Does a Beneficiary Designation “Trump” a Will?<\/p>\n
I recently noticed that someone was directed to my website from a google search for that exact phrase, “does a beneficiary designation trump a will?”\u00a0 Hmmmm . . . if people are asking the question, sounds like a good thing to address in a blog post.<\/p>\n
So, here you go.\u00a0 Yes.<\/p>\n
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That of course is the short answer.\u00a0 Here is a little more detail.\u00a0 Beneficiary designations are commonly used for life insurance and retirement accounts.\u00a0 They designate who you want to receive the benefits of the policy or account upon your death.\u00a0 In most cases I see that the spouse is designated as the primary beneficiary (first person designated) and the children (in equal shares) are designated as the contingent beneficiaries (basically, the backups), that is if they even named contingent beneficiaries.\u00a0 There are a many considerations that go into a beneficiary designation, however I will save those for a future post.<\/p>\n
Beneficiary designations are a means of non-probate transfer – they bypass the probate court process when someone dies.\u00a0 Because they bypass probate, they are not subject to Michigan’s intestacy distribution laws (the laws that determine who gets what) or what a person’s Will says (the Will serves as a “roadmap” for the probate process).\u00a0 So do they “trump” a will?\u00a0 I don’t know that I would say that . . . it’s more like they thumb their noses at the will and do what they please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Does a Beneficiary Designation “Trump” a Will? I recently noticed that someone was directed to my website from a google search for that exact phrase, “does a beneficiary designation trump a will?”\u00a0 Hmmmm . . . if people are asking the question, sounds like a good thing to address in a blog post. So, here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-estate-planning"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1437,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions\/1437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lichtermanlaw.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}