I left my job in the summer and got a 401K check in the mail August 1. I forgot about it and didn't get it cashed and now it's past the 90 day void period. What can I do? Did I lose that money?

You will have to contact the admin company and get them to issue a new check,

Thank you for your respondence!

They may have a small fee 5 dollars to 15 dollars for research and making the check ( should not, but today there are fees for anything) Most likely they will require you to send the other check back in.

Of course I would not have mentioned the date and just tried to deposit it and see if it went though, but that is just me. Only if it was returned would I have worried about it.

And since the time to rollover the distribution is now past, you will have to pay taxes and a 10% penalty when you file your taxes (assuming you are not near retirement age).

On the taxes Scott, I wonder, since they did not cash the check, did they actually receive them ?

But it is a good question, are they planning on moving it to another qualified plan

Well, we wished we could have moved it to another fund, but from what we've been reading it looks like since the check was sent and we didn't do anything with it within the 60 day policy we have to cash it and pay the taxes. I guess I'm right on that one? They already took taxes out of it and we're only talking about a little over $800.00 here so the taxes we will have to pay on it isn't too much is it?

Ok, so it is not 1000's of dollars, it should have little tax issues then, since they already held taxes out

We're thinking about just putting it into a Roth IRA. What do you think about that decision or can we do that?

You can do that. But you will still have to pay the taxes and penalties for 2011. With a Roth IRA, you pay taxes on the amounts deposited, but your income is then tax free. So there is no issue of a rollover to avoid taxation.

Was it $800 total or after taxes were taken out? You will also have to pay a 10% penalty on the full amount of the distribution. If taxes were already taken out the total would probably have been closer to $1K. So you will have to set aside $100 for the penalty.