Generally, to contribute to a retirement plan, you need to have either wages or net business income. My understanding of the rules is that unless you operate a business where you own lots of rental properties, net rental income is NOT considered net business income - and therefore can't be factored in when determining retirement plan contributions.

Have you considered "hiring" your wife at your practice, and then having her max out her $15.5k of salary deferrals through your practice's 401k plan (assuming that's the plan you have in place)?

Another option is for your wife to ask her practice to reduce the hours an employee must work to be able to make salary deferrals only, without changing the rules for the match and the profit sharing plan contributions. She will probably need to contact the Third Party Administrators that helped design and now maintain the group's retirement plan. In my office, we reduced the hours a person must work each year to be eligible to participate in our safe harbor 401k plan to 750 hours, so our front desk person would be able to participate in our plan, even though she was going to work less than 1000 hours per year at that time.

Zip Code: 01801

Does she earn less than $105,000 as a part time practitioner? If so, the plan could be designed to let her into the plan of the practice she works for without causing any discrimination problem (in fact, it would help the 8 Drs pass those tests). It could be designed so that she gets $46,000 of her pay in the form of retirement benefit contributions.

please give me more information on this retirement plan...thank you