Keeping Your IRA Safe
An IRA is an individualized retirement account that was set up by the federal government to encourage people to save for their golden years. In some cases, employers will set these accounts up for their employees, which are known as 401K accounts. When the account is set up by your employer, any contributions made to the account cannot be deducted from your taxes. In other words, the account is considered a nondeductible IRA. These accounts go missing year after year and the government is finally trying to call attention to the problem. If you want to learn how to keep your 401K safe and you want to know how to locate your nondeductible IRA in case you’ve misplaced it, you’ve come to the right place.
Keeping Your Money Safe
Keep your 401K safe – this advice becomes an issue when you happen to change jobs. This is usually when people end up forgetting about their nondeductible IRA account altogether. They have had a little bit of money in the account and so they may have thought that the account was worth very little. It’s only until years later, after the nondeductible IRA has managed to gather interest, that the money ends up becoming much more substantial.
Whether you have a little or a lot in your account, it’s important to keep your 401K safe. You can do this by checking on it every six months to a year. Check the balance and see how much interest is accruing. It is always good to periodically check on all of your accounts that have to deal with money just to make sure things are going how you anticipated when you set them up.
If you managed to lose track of your nondeductible IRA account, either because you changed jobs or because of some other reason, you can find it again by searching an easy-to-use online database called Cash Unclaimed. This will actually show you if you have any IRA’s or money accounts of any types out there waiting for you to claim them. Even if it is any type of money account under your name the search will show the details. You can even do a broad search on just your last name or on your families traditional name to see if any of your loved ones have money just sitting out there under their names.
Searching Cash Unclaimed with a first and last name will help you locate any nondeductible IRA accounts that may have been lost, even if they went missing years ago. Then, if you happen to find an account, keep your 401K safe by keeping your paperwork handy and by checking with your account manager on a regular basis.
Even though the nondeductible IRA isn’t relevant at tax time, you should still check in on it from time to time. Keep your 401K safe. After all, it’s your money and you worked hard for it. Just because it is not an account that gets taxed doesn’t mean it is not an account that needs to be monitored. Sometimes notices to change the interest rates or other important details are never, well, noticed, and this can lead to all kinds of problems down the line. So like mentioned before, it is always a great idea to keep track of all and any money accounts to make sure your money is exactly where you think it should be!
