Investment advisor Scott Hanson talks about retirement plans and IRA rollovers.

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People often reach retirement age and they have a handful of different retirement accounts. They have a 401(k) with their current employer, maybe another pension plan with their current employer. They might have a 401(k) with a previous employer or two. They also perhaps have an IRA at the credit union they established back in the '80s. Maybe they've got another IRA at a mutual fund company.

Now, at retirement time though, often, retirees like the idea of consolidating everything into one account. That's really the IRA rollover. Now, an IRA rollover is not an investment that you buy, it's not really an investment, it's how investments are titled. So inside an IRA rollover account you can have a number of different types of investments. You can have great diversification within the IRA rollover.

But the real benefit, and I think the reason why people enjoy the IRA rollover, is the fact that all these things are consolidated into one nice account. They receive a statement on a monthly basis so they can just look up at that account, and at retirement time when it's time to start taking some income, it just simplifies the process a great deal, particularly when people are reaching age 70½ and they have to take required minimum distributions. That's why we're really seeing the popularity of IRA rollovers grow over the years and continue to grow today and I think, for a lot of retirees, it makes a tremendous amount of sense.