Personal Finance and Investing

So they lump all your traditional IRAs (TIRAs) together into one TIRA (conceptually) so when you make withdrawals, it's always pro-rated -- if 10% of your TIRA contributions were made with after-tax dollars (no matter to which particular TIRA accounts), then 10% of your withdrawals are non-taxable and 90% of withdrawals are taxable .... no matter whether you segregated your TIRAs or not, and no matter which TIRA accounts you made withdrawals from.

Well, all investment earnings in traditional IRAs are taxable, so my paragraph above is over-simplified (sigh).

Another exception: special purpose IRAs, like inherited IRAs, are treated separately from regular traditional IRAs. And kept in separate properly titled accounts or there will be problems!

I've never made charitable contributions from an IRA (I very probably will in the not-to-distant future when I reach 70 1/2), so I left that out in the above, I would only be speculating about how that's treated.