Gold IRA Companies in Minnetonka Work Around an Empty HQ

Gold IRA companies in Minnetonka are working a city of 53,064 people where the median household income, $119,517, hasn't budged even though the town's largest employer packed up and left. UnitedHealth Group — Minnesota's largest publicly traded company — moved its headquarters out of Minnetonka's Bren Road campus to Eden Prairie's Optum campus in the first half of 2024, closing out a run that had defined the local office market for decades. That income figure, a notch below Edina's and well under Wayzata's, makes Minnetonka a different kind of Twin Cities suburb: not old shoreline money, not a single planned enclave, but a working professional base spread across four ZIP codes — 55305, 55343, 55345, and 55391 — that lost its anchor tenant without losing its paychecks.

The complication is what happened to the building afterward. UnitedHealth confirmed in 2023 it wouldn't renew the Bren Road lease, and once the move to Eden Prairie wrapped up in early 2024, the old Minnetonka campus sat vacant. It didn't stay just vacant — the property was later placed into receivership after missing a loan deadline, a blunt outcome for a campus that once ran the daily operations of a Fortune 5 company. For anyone quoting a gold IRA rollover, that's not trivia. A defaulted, empty office campus is a visible marker of how much institutional weight left town, even while the income figures held steady.

Carlson Companies never left. The privately held parent of Radisson Hotel Group has run its world headquarters from 701 Carlson Parkway since Curt Carlson built the 313,495-square-foot campus, and it's still there today — a reminder that Minnetonka's corporate base was never just one company's ZIP code. Ridgedale Center, the enclosed mall that opened in 1974 at 12401 Wayzata Boulevard, still anchors the retail side with Nordstrom, Macy's, JCPenney, and Dick's House of Sport across just over a million square feet of leasable space. Add in Glen Lake — a neighborhood built on the former grounds of a 1916 tuberculosis sanatorium that once ranked among the top three TB treatment centers in the world before closing in 1991 and becoming a Three Rivers Park District golf course — and Minnetonka reads less like a company town and more like four or five smaller ones stitched into one 53,064-person city.

None of that corporate reshuffling changes what happens on a Minnesota tax return. A 401(k), pension, or IRA distribution is taxed as ordinary income at the state's regular brackets regardless of whether it originated at Carlson, at UnitedHealth before the move, or at a smaller employer near Ridgedale or Glen Lake — up to 9.85% for income above roughly $193,240 single or $321,950 married. Minnetonka's $119,517 median household income puts a meaningful share of local filers well inside the upper brackets before a rollover distribution is even added to the return.

With roughly 22.8% of Minnetonka already 65 or older against a median age of 43, the triggers aren't rare exceptions. A Carlson Parkway executive retiring after a career at the Radisson parent company, a UnitedHealth employee who followed the job to Eden Prairie but kept the Minnetonka address and is now weighing what to do with an old 401(k), a Glen Lake homeowner in a house built in the 1940s or '50s finally settling an estate — each puts a fully taxed Minnesota distribution on the table, and none of it depends on whether the old employer's building is still occupied. What still separates one gold IRA company from another in Minnetonka comes down to the same three line items it always does: setup fee, annual storage, and buyback spread, worth comparing before the tax bracket math locks in for the year.