IRA Beneficiary
24. Disadvantages
The only downside of naming a charity as beneficiary is that it has no life expectancy. While this would have no impact on the distributions you receive during your lifetime, it could have some implications on distributions after you die.
Also, there is no spousal rollover or stretch out as we have been discussing. However, because a charity is exempt from income taxes, the "tax-deferral" continues indefinitely.
NOTE: In the past, if you named a charity as beneficiary you had to use just your life expectancy when determining distributions during your lifetime. This made the distributions higher than they would have been with another beneficiary. But now, even with a charity as your beneficiary, you would use the Uniform Table to determine your Required Minimum Distributions, so this is no longer a problem.