IRA Beneficiary
15. Spousal Rollover Option
If you die first, your spouse can "rollover" your tax-deferred account into his or her own IRA. If your spouse is younger than you are, the money can stay in the IRA, growing tax-deferred, until your spouse reaches age 70 1/2.
When your spouse does the rollover, he or she names a new beneficiary - preferably a much younger one, such as your children and grandchildren.
After your spouse dies, the beneficiary's actual life expectancy will be used for the remaining distributions. Depending on the ages of your children and/or grandchildren, this could mean decades of tax-deferred growth.
Under current IRS policy, your spouse can do this rollover and stretch out the IRA even if you had started taking required minimum distributions before you died.