Forbes has published an article: “Is Your California IRA Protected From Creditors? Probably Not”, which discusses Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and whether or not they are protected from creditors in the state of California. The article begins as follows:
A lot of folks in California, including probably a majority of professional legal and financial advisors, seem to think that Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) are either completely or partially exempt from creditors in the event of a judgment. Indeed, every year I end up reviewing a number of asset protection plans on a second-opinion basis for folks in California, and, sure enough, the involved planner will almost always have just blithely presumed that the client’s IRA account will be an exempt asset not available to creditors. Today we will explore the validity of that presumption and find that it usually is not a safe one.
Posted by Mallory Wentz, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.