I often speak to groups on the topic of estate planning. (If you want me to speak to your group, please contact us!) When I do, I always talk about how best to protect kids in the event the worst happens and the parents both die. You see, if children are too young or too immature to do something sensible with an inheritance, I usually recommend that the inheritance should be held in trust. Inevitably, someone will say, "I named my parents as the beneficiaries on all my accounts. They ...
Check Your Beneficiary Designations!
Please, right now, stop what you are doing and take a few minutes to log into your retirement accounts and call your insurance broker to check your beneficiary designations. The theme this week has been people who have passed with no beneficiary designated or with the incorrect beneficiary designated. In one case, a man designated his wife as the beneficiary on his retirement account. They divorced, he remarried, and lived another twenty years. But he never changed his beneficiary from ...
Naming A Trust As A Beneficiary Of An Ira
This discussion comes up a lot in my estate planning – should I name a trust as a beneficiary of an IRA? The answer is almost always no, although the pros and cons need to be weighed on a case by case basis. Typically this question boils down to whether the tax consequences of naming a trust as the beneficiary are outweighed by the original purpose of the trust. To address this question, we first need to think about why the trust was created. It might be a trust designed to protect ...
