When you rollover Your IRA, you:
- Withdraw cash (or other assets such as stock, or mutual funds) from one qualified retirement plan or IRA account, and
- Reinvest it (roll it over) in another qualified retirement plan or IRA account within a certain time limit (usually 60 days).
Rollovers usually occur when you leave your job and receive all the funds in your retirement plan account. The most common rollovers are the movement of money:
- From one IRA to another IRA of the same type (traditional IRA to traditional IRA, or Roth IRA to Roth IRA).
- From an employer’s plan to a traditional IRA.
- From one employer’s plan to another employer’s plan.
- From an IRA to an employer’s plan (this was new in 2002).
If you have your plan administrator transfer the money from your qualified retirement plan account directly to an IRA account or another qualified retirement plan, that is a direct rollover, often called a trustee transfer, and is the preferable way to move money between retirement accounts as you will see.
