Life Insurace

Are Your Documents Following the Same Script?

Needham Estate Planning

In the event of your untimely death, the manner in which your beneficiaries -- or those people who receive your assets from your estate -- are determined is highly dependent on how your property is titled.

Generally, property with title includes vehicles, boats, airplanes, real estate, bank accounts, savings bonds, life insurance policies, retirement accounts, and stock certificates.

If you die without a will or a trust and haven’t used any beneficiary or transfer on death options, state law will determine who inherits property with a title.

On the other hand, property without a title, such as jewelry, antiques, art, and even your digital assets are usually provided for in your will or trust, and if you don’t have one typically goes to your heirs at law.

As you can see, who you have listed as a beneficiary -- and not having a beneficiary designation at all -- can have serious implications for your family after you have passed away.

Increasingly, a wide range of financial products allows you to name a beneficiary upon your passing.

The benefit of naming a beneficiary is that the assets go directly to the named beneficiary upon the account owner’s passing, often bypassing the long and expensive process of probate.

The danger is, however, that when these designations are not carefully coordinated with your estate plan you can inadvertently disinherit a loved one, cause a disabled family member to lose government benefits, leave your heirs with a massive tax bill, or otherwise fail to achieve your goals.

What is a Beneficiary Designation?

Simply put, a beneficiary designation is a contractual agreement where the bank, insurance company, or financial company agrees to pay a person or entity, that you have selected, the specific assets upon your death.

For example, Bob may list Susan, his sister, as the payable on death (POD) beneficiary for his savings account at ABC Bank. When Bob dies, ABC Bank will pay Susan the balance in Bob’s account, without Susan having to first go to probate court.

But properly choosing a beneficiary and making sure it falls in line with your estate plan is often more complex than it seems at first glance.

Completing a beneficiary designation form is not just a routine task that you complete when filling out your bank account, life insurance, or human resources documents. In fact, naming beneficiaries is something that you should take very seriously and should consult your estate planning attorney about.

Coordinating Your Beneficiaries

It’s important to note that beneficiary designations supersede your will or trust.

For example, let’s suppose that Bob’s will stated that his entire estate is to be given to Elizabeth, his daughter. Since Bob used a payable on death beneficiary designation on his ABC Bank account, that asset will instead go to Susan, not Elizabeth.

In other words, if you name one relative to inherit assets in your will or trust, but some of those assets have someone else listed on the beneficiary designation, then your entire plan isn’t going to work as you likely intend.

For this reason, it is vital to ensure that your beneficiary designations are coordinated or aligned with your estate plan in order to fully protect you and your family.

Of note, many beneficiary forms have a designation for contingent beneficiaries.

A contingent beneficiary is basically a “Plan B” to your initial designation. So, in the event, your primary beneficiary passes away before you, the contingent beneficiary steps in their place and gets their share of the asset.

Estate Planning Help

The best strategy for ensuring your wishes are carried out is to first understand how naming beneficiaries has a significant impact on your heirs and then coordinate your wishes with an estate planner.

We are here to help you coordinate all of your assets and beneficiary designations with your estate plan so that everyone gets the protection they deserve.

How to Protect Life Insurance Proceeds

One misconception people have about life insurance is that naming beneficiaries is all you have to do to ensure the benefits of life insurance will be available for a surviving spouse or children.

Life insurance is an important estate planning tool, but you need to make sure certain protections.  Or there’s no guarantee that your spouse or children will receive the benefit of your purchase of life insurance.

Consider the following examples:

Example 1:

David identifies his wife, Betsy as the beneficiary on a life insurance policy. Betsy does receive the death benefit from the insurance policy, but when Betsy remarries, she adds her new husband’s name to the bank account where she deposited the death benefit. In so doing, she leaves the death benefit from David’s life insurance to her new husband, rather than to her children as she and David discussed before his death and which is what she indicates in her will.

Example 2:

Dawn, a single mother, names her 10-year-old son Mark as a beneficiary on her life insurance. She passes away when he is twelve. The court names a relative as a guardian or conservator for Mark until he is of age. By the time Mark reaches his 18th birthday, his inheritance has been partially spent down on court costs, attorney’s fees, and guardian or conservator fees. Additionally, it hasn’t kept pace with inflation because of the restrictive investment options available to guardians or conservators. Dawn hoped the life insurance proceeds would be there for Mark’s college, but the costs and lack of investment flexibility mean there may not be as much as Dawn hoped.

One Solution: Use a Trust as the Beneficiary of Your Life Insurance

When estate planning, a common method for passing assets is by placing them in a trust, with a spouse or children as beneficiaries. The same approach may also be used for life insurance policy proceeds. You can designate the trust as the life insurance policy’s beneficiary, so the death benefits flow directly into the trust. Two popular ways to accomplish this:

Revocable Living Trust (RLT) Is the named beneficiary

This option works well for those who have a modest-sized estate or who have already set up a trust. Naming your RLT as a life insurance beneficiary simply adds those death benefits to what you already have in trust, payable only to beneficiaries of the trust itself. The benefit of this approach is that it instantly coordinates your life insurance proceeds with the rest of your estate plan.

Set up an Irrevocable Life Insurance Trust (ILIT)

For an added layer of protection, an ILIT can both own the life insurance policy and be named as the beneficiary.  As The Balance explains, this not only protects the death benefits from potential creditors and predators but from estate taxes as well.

With the estate tax exemption at $5.49 million per person in 2017 and a potential repeal on the legislative agenda of President Trump and the Republican Congress, you may not need estate tax planning. But everyone who’s purchased life insurance needs to take an extra step to ensure your loved ones’ financial future. To discuss your best options for structuring your life insurance estate plan, give us a call today. We’re here to help.