{"id":4474,"date":"2019-10-04T15:52:23","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T19:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lindabury.com\/firm\/?p=4474"},"modified":"2020-05-04T18:28:40","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T22:28:40","slug":"the-importance-of-beneficiary-designations-in-estate-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lindabury.com\/firm\/insights\/the-importance-of-beneficiary-designations-in-estate-planning.html","title":{"rendered":"The Importance of Beneficiary Designations in Estate Planning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When a person signs a will (or a will coupled with a revocable trust) in order to set forth a plan for the distribution of his or her estate following death, he or she often believes the estate plan is complete. But if the person has failed to carefully consider the beneficiary designations on life insurance policies, retirement accounts, and other assets, and coordinate those designations with the estate plan, the result following death may be quite different from what was intended.<\/p>\n<p>Wills do not override beneficiary designations; rather, beneficiary designations ordinarily take precedence over wills. For example, if a will leaves everything a testator owns at the time of death to the spouse, and testator has a $1 million life insurance policy on which the couple\u2019s three children have been designated as equal beneficiaries, the life insurance passes to the children at testator\u2019s death, not to the spouse. This result arises because the language of the will works only to distribute the assets that are part of the testator\u2019s \u201cprobate estate,\u201d meaning those assets in testator\u2019s sole name without beneficiary designations.<\/p>\n<p>Examples of assets not part of the probate estate are assets with beneficiary designations (usually life insurance and retirement accounts, and sometimes bank and brokerage accounts), any assets with a \u201cPOD\u201d (pay on death) or \u201cTOD\u201d (transfer on death) designation, and any assets titled in the names of two or more people as \u201cjoint tenants with right of survivorship\u201d or \u201ctenants by the entireties.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"read_more_link\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lindabury.com\/firm\/insights\/the-importance-of-beneficiary-designations-in-estate-planning.html\"  title=\"Continue Reading The Importance of Beneficiary Designations in Estate Planning\" class=\"more-link\">Continue Reading \u203a<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When a person signs a will (or a will coupled with a revocable trust) in order to set forth a plan for the distribution of his or her estate following death, he or she often believes the estate plan is complete. But if the person has failed to carefully consider the beneficiary designations on life [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[293,65,343],"tags":[],"coauthors":[295],"class_list":["post-4474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robbins","category-insights","category-wills-trusts-estates-insights"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Importance of Beneficiary Designations in Estate Planning &#8212; October 4, 2019 &#8212; Lindabury, McCormick, Estabrook &amp; Cooper, P.C. Firm News &amp; Events<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When a person signs a will (or a will coupled with a revocable trust) in order to set forth a plan for the distribution of his or her estate following\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lindabury.com\/firm\/insights\/the-importance-of-beneficiary-designations-in-estate-planning.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Importance of Beneficiary Designations in Estate Planning &#8212; October 4, 2019 &#8212; Lindabury, McCormick, Estabrook &amp; Cooper, P.C. 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