Another selling point of MLPs is tax deferral. (So hold MLPs in a taxable, not a tax-deferred, account.) The deferral works like this: In your early years of owning an MLP, most of your cash payout counts as a return of capital--it isn't taxable, but it reduces your basis in the MLP shares.

FORBES: Money & Investing

Under current rules, people who inherit IRAs can "stretch" their withdrawals across their life expectancies, paying income tax only on the amounts they remove from the account and continuing the tax deferral on any earnings inside.

WSJ: Family Value: Will the Government Shrink Your IRA?

Here's a surprise: If you've inherited a 401(k), you can use the new deferral break for any funds still left in the account after Jan. 1.

FORBES: Magazine Article

With a stretch-out IRA you leave the account to, say, your kids, and they keep the tax deferral going over their own life expectancies, which could be decades.

FORBES: Magazine Article

For example, if you leave an individual retirement account to a bypass trust, it cuts short the IRA's income tax deferral.

FORBES: While Congress fiddles, lawyers finagle.

These aspects included segregating each individual retirement account, offering the choice to save (defer) or not to save, ranges of deferral amounts, the ability to modify those deferral amounts, investment election choices, portability, loans and much more.

FORBES: Variable Annuity Mini-Boom Coming