[masraum]

Originally Posted by john walker's workshop

Thank you all, that's very helpful. Looks like an hourly adviser and roll the IRA into our local bank is the way to go. We'll get busy.

I'd find out of she rolled her 401k into an IRA or if she just took the lump sum out of the 401k and paid all of the taxes already.

If it's currently in an IRA, generally speaking, I would not roll the money to your local bank (unless maybe they have an IRA option). If the concern is the market tanking, then you can get out of the market, but leave the money in the IRA as "cash". That way you don't have to worry about paying taxes on it, but it's also readily available. You can pull as much or as little as you want and only take the tax hit on what you take out instead of all of it.

If she took everything out of the 401k and put it into a regular brokerage account and has already paid all of the taxes on it then do whatever you want, because there won't be any tax hit or any other hit from moving the money around.