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 ...
Community Property Pitfalls
Continuing on my theme of community property and co-ownership of property, I wanted to address a common misunderstanding that creates a pitfall for the unwary: in Idaho, just because you have a particular beneficiary designation on an account or on life insurance does not always mean that the beneficiary will receive those funds. Take, for example, a divorced couple who has children between them. Perhaps they agree to take out life insurance policies benefiting each other in the event of ...
What Is GINA?
The Genetic Information Nondisclosure Act of 1998 (“GINA”) deals with the use of genetic information in insurance and employment. Prior to GINA, there was a fear that, as doctors make increasing use of a patient’s genetic information in the diagnosis and treatment of disease, insurers and employers would make increasing use of such information for less legitimate reasons. The concern was that an insurer might learn that you have a genetic predisposition to cancer, for example, and on that ...
