One term you might hear at Annex Wealth Management is “mish mash.” That’s what we call the situation when a potential client comes to us with a lifetime of ideas, investments or plans they hoped to cobble together to be a financial plan. What people who have a “mish mash” discover is that it’s hard to manage, often disorganized, difficult to update and track, and could have negative effects on reaching their goals.

We sometimes see a “mish mash” occur with estate planning and beneficiary designation. The negative effects of not having coordination and organization can be severe. The best gift you can give your family is a clean and easily-executed estate.

  1. You may have a well-crafted estate plan – and if you don’t, make sure your advisor has a team of professionals ready to help you, like we do at Annex Wealth Management – but one common error occurs when investors have the option of naming beneficiaries directly on a wide range of financial products.

When the account owner dies, the assets go directly to the beneficiaries named on the accounts, bypassing the sometimes-long-and-costly probate process.

Because these beneficiary designations override your will, they need to be carefully coordinated with your overall estate plan.

  1. Our Financial Planning team tends to recommend reviewing all of your beneficiary designations regularly, but certainly after you experience a life-changing event, such as a marriage, divorce, birth or death of a loved one.

 

***That includes job changes and retirement. Beneficiary designations on retirement plans don’t carry over when you roll a 401(k) to a new employer’s plan or to an IRA, or when you convert a regular IRA to a Roth IRA.