Roth IRA question...

[kingnat]

This may be a bit out of left field, but I know there are some finance savvy posters on this forum so here it goes...

My wife and I both have Roth IRAs. We want to buy a home in 3-4 years time. I will getting additional retirement savings through my new job, so I was going to use our Roth IRAs to put away monies for the house. In order to pull out monies tax-free from the Roth, we need to 1) have the Roth account for 5 years (and this is not necessarily 5 calender years), 2) be "qualified first time home buyer" (the person withdrawing can't have been the principal owner of a home in the previous 2 years), and 3) you can only withdraw up to 10k in earnings (not a problem... ).

My question is... if we are able to dump 4k in each of our Roth's each year for the next two years... can we pull out the full 16k + earnings all tax free to use as a downpayment on a house? I done a fair amount of intergoogling and haven't found anything on whether this is acceptable.

Thanks in advance...

[AHiltz]

My best advice to you is to ask an accountant/tax lawyer in your state/province. I have heard a lot of shitty advice in regards to taxation here in NS, and I always call Revenue Canada for clarifiation.

[ensign_lee]

What he said in teh post above is true.

However, if you just want some quick, unofficial (and sometimes maybe completely wrong) answers, fool.com's boards are good for that.

As far as I know, though, I wouldn't recommend borrowing from your IRA. Things get extremely F*^#ed up when that happens.

[kingnat]

As far as I know, though, I wouldn't recommend borrowing from your IRA. Things get extremely F*^#ed up when that happens.

Could you explain more? I'm not actually intending on taking money from our currently investing retirement monies. Rather I plan on relying on the new job's retirement program (killer matching offer) for the next two years. We are working on a home downpayment, and using the Roth IRA should get us tax free interest. I don't see what could get F*cked here...