Determining the ‘Right’ IRA Balance

401k, retirement, IRA, RMDs, EBRI

Be careful how your clients take those dollars.

Make sure you understand what is—and is not—held away when determining retirement assets.

Sounds obvious, yet new research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) finds the overall cumulative, average IRA balance per individual is 27 percent larger than the IRA balance per account.

It can have major implications when deciding how, and from where, to take required minimum distributions, among other issues.

The research organization finds that the average IRA account balance in the database was $97,515 at year-end 2016, the year studied, and the average individual balance (when all accounts owned by the individual are combined) was $123,973.

Average account balances differed significantly by the type. Roths had the lowest average balance, while Traditionals had the highest average balances.

Rollovers to IRAs in 2016, regardless of the source, amounted to over 16 times more than the total contributions in the database, with the average and median rollover to a Traditional IRA in 2016 at $94,238 and $21,383, respectively.

Other important findings include:

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