The Old Tax Laws on IRAs No Longer Apply

Anyone who has ever studied tax law in school knows one thing to be true: Whatever you learned that semester is useless because tax laws change by the second.

So it should come as no surprise that the Internal Revenue Service has done it again.

"Everything you ever learned about IRAs is all useless trash," says Bill Fleming, director of personal financial services for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Hartford, Conn. Every book you ever bought, every dollar you spent with a tax planner trying to figure out the gritty rules --all wasted money.

In case you haven't heard, for the first time in a while, the U.S. Treasury has proposed changes to the distribution rules for IRAs and other retirement savings vehicles -- like your 401(k) -- that are actually beneficial to taxpayers. ...