Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 12:38:38 CST
From: dcp12345678@yahoo.com (dcp)
Newsgroups: misc.invest.financial-plan
Subject:  403b rollover question
Message-ID:  <1b8617a8.0403040831.2c5c2f3d@posting.google.com>
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	=Y6oD

Here's my situation.  My wife has a 403b and 401a plan at her previous
employer.  She left that job about a year ago because of the birth of
our
daughter and doesn't plan to return to it.

I have a 401k plan at my current employer, and what I'd like to do is
roll her
403b and 401a money into *my* 401k.  However, I called my benefits
hotline
and they said I couldn't do that because the 403b and 401a are in her
name,
which would prevent me from being able to roll them into my plan.

Question1:
So I came up with this idea.  If I roll her 403b and 401a into a
conduit IRA in her name,and then switch the ownership to me, would I
then be able to roll the funds into my 401k?  The benefits
representative seemed to think this would be ok.
I'm just a little worried about the "switch ownership" part.  Am I
going to
run into problems there? If there's a better way to accomplish this,
I'd love to hear it.

Question2:
Another twist.  My wife also has a Roth IRA.  Another option would be
to to roll her 403b and 401a into a conduit IRA in her name (I don't
think I can roll them directly into her Roth, correct me if I'm wrong
here).  Then I could roll from the conduit to her Roth, realizing that
I'm going to pay tax on the conversion amount.  Is this type of roll
possible?

Question3:
If you roll funds into a Roth from a conduit IRA, can you still make
your $3000 contribution for the year or does it count against it?

My main reason for wanting to roll directly into my 401k was to avoid
any tax consequence, which I would incur if we roll to the conduit and
then to her Roth.  I don't really want to have any kind of IRA's
except for Roths.

If you've made it to this point, thanks for reading!  I'm interested
in any advice you folks can offer.