Please mark your IRA calendar with the following deadlines
October 1
If you own your own business, and you are thinking of starting a SIMPLE IRA Plan for you and your employees, October 1 is the deadline for setting up the plan for 2012. Your SIMPLE IRA Plan agreement must be completed and signed by then.
October 15
Recharacterizations
Generally, the deadline for recharacterizing a Roth IRA conversion is your tax filing due date. However, if you filed your tax return or filed for an extension by your due date, you received an automatic 6-month extension to complete your recharacterization. This 6-month extension ends on October 15 for calendar year tax filers.
This deadline also applies if you made contributions to a Traditional IRA and want to change it to a Roth IRA contribution or vice versa.
Correcting Excess IRA Contributions
If you contribute more than is allowed to your Traditional IRA or Roth IRA for 2011, you will owe the IRS a 6 percent excise tax on the excess amount unless it is corrected by October 15.
October 31
Deadline to provide trust documentation to the IRA custodian, if the IRA owner died during 2011 and the beneficiary of the IRA is a qualified trust. Providing the trust documentation by this deadline is only one of the requirements that must be met in order for the life-expectancy of the oldest beneficiary of the trust to be used to calculate required minimum distributions (RMD) for the beneficiaries of the trust.
