“Portable,” as defined in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary, means “capable of being transported or conveyed.” A portable retirement account would allow you to move it from one employer to another without any discernible detriment to you. As a rule, employers in either the not-for-profit or the for-profit sector rarely permit employees to bring retirement plans from previous employers to their new positions. On occasion, Congress has debated enacting legislation that would allow for the creation of individual pension accounts that could be moved from one employer to another. (more…)

In this part, we describe the various distribution options that are avail able for the withdrawal of your TIAA-CREF accumulation after you have retired. The rules governing almost all of these options originate in the Code. Again, we will try our best to describe them in nontechnical terms.

The transition from a working environment to retirement poses financial as well as emotional challenges. (more…)

We have alluded to the Transfer Payout Annuity from time to time, and now it gets the attention it clearly deserves. The Transfer Payout Annuity is literally an annuity, and it represents the mechanism by which funds are transferred from a TIAA accumulation to either one of the other investment choices in the TIAA-CREF family or as a taxable distribution after age 59 1/2 to the participant. (more…)