The Ten-Year Trap: Why Inheriting Your Parent's IRA in Texas Isn't What Most Families Think — and Why the 25% Penalty Is Now Live
Sandra Keene spent six months after her father's death telling herself she had ten years to decide what to do with the $640,000 IRA she inherited. Her father had worked for thirty years as a civil engineer in Allen and had been taking required minimum distributions since age seventy-two. What nobody told Sandra — not the bank, not the financial advisor, not the obituary notice that said simply 'IRA passed to designated beneficiary' — was that the ten-year rule has two entirely different tracks. And in 2025, the IRS penalty waiver that had been quietly protecting people who got it wrong finally expired.
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