There are certain assets that you may have where you, as the account owner, completed a form called a Beneficiary Designation Form (“BDF”) that will determine who will receive all or a portion of the assets upon your death. Such accounts include IRAs and other retirement accounts, annuities, and even bank and brokerage accounts.
STEP #3: Review Your Beneficiary Designations
Once you have access to your beneficiary designations, take a moment to review each one to ensure that you have properly designated beneficiaries. Some of your accounts may appropriately list your Living Trust as beneficiary to follow the beneficiary distribution you have designated in your Living Trust. If you have an IRA Inheritance Trust®, and have IRAs or retirement plans it may be better to list the IRA Inheritance Trust® or its subtrusts set up for the benefit of each beneficiary. You should check the instruction letters your estate planning attorney gave you when you set up or last revised your estate plan.
If you are a client of ours and are unclear as to whether your beneficiary designations are set up as they should be to ensure that your estate plan is properly administered, this is something that our law firm can assist you with during your free 3-year review checkup meeting. This brings us to…
BONUS STEP #4: Make Sure Your Estate Plan is Also Properly Up-to-Date
If you have an estate plan (prepared by us or not), and you have not had your estate plan reviewed in the past 3 years, contact our office at 1-800-756-5596 and we can assist you in setting up a free review meeting with an attorney. During that meeting, we can review your estate plan to ensure that it is up-to-date with your wishes, changes in the law and the newest planning techniques. During that review meeting, we also can check your asset titles and your beneficiary designations to be sure they correctly reflect your estate plan.
