Turning down free money sounds like something only a very strange person would do.
And yet every year thousands of Americans formally refuse inherited retirement accounts, on purpose, with a lawyer's help, and come out ahead for it.
The tool is called a qualified disclaimer. It is one of the few genuinely elegant instruments in the tax code, and it has a hard deadline measured in months.
Here is when it makes sense, how it works, and the four mistakes that destroy it.