I swore a mighty oath on a skyscraper of Bibles to never write about RRSPs again, so pretend that this is a post about FBARs and not RRSPs at all. That is actually semi-accurate because the logic applied here need not only apply to RRSPs.
A gentleman posted a comment on The Last RRSP Post Ever and I thought it would be worth promoting it to blog post territory in order to give it greater visibility:
... continue readingSo what is the semi-nearly-somewhat nearly way to fix it I have not filed FinCen Form 114 for the past 5 years? I have been in US since 2000 and have been filing 8891 every year since 2004… and didn’t realize I need to include RRSP in FinCen until I found out that 8891 become obsolete :(.
Up to now the way to fix an unreported RRSP problem was by incurring brain damage, spending lots of money, or suffering through terminal uncertainty and fear. Or all of the above.
Your Old ChoicesI kid, I kid. Your choices were:
You cannot do a tax-free rollover of your RRSP into an IRA.
An Individual Retirement Account in the United States is the equivalent of the Registered Retirement Savings Plan in Canada. One idea people have is that if they are going to live in the United States permanently they would like to roll over their RRSP accounts into IRA accounts.
IRAs can only receive rollover contributions from other pension plans which are “qualified plans” as that term is defined in the U.S. tax law. An RRSP is not a “qualified plan” therefore if you put the RRSP money into an IRA you will destroy the tax-exempt status of the IRA for U.S.... continue reading
Where I am about to talk about RRSPs.... continue reading