This week, we are turning the intricacies of naming beneficiaries and transferring retirement funds into easy, actionable, steps.
In this episode, Zacc Call and Laura Hadley chat with, Kelsey Dent, Partner & Director of Financial Services at Capita Financial Network as she shares her insight around the process of naming beneficiaries, how to do so properly, and how to avoid some of the most common mistakes.
Zacc, Laura, and Kelsey discuss:
[00:00:00] Welcome to The Financial Call. We are financial advisors on a mission to guide you through the financial planning everyone should have, whether you're doing it yourself or working with a financial advisor. These episodes will help you break down complicated financial topics into practical, actionable steps. Our mission is to guide motivated people to become financially successful. Welcome to The Financial Call. This is Zacc Call, and as usual, we have Laura with us. But not as usual. We have Kelsey Dent and I'll tell you a little bit about Kelsey. Kelsey started at Capita when? How long ago? Seven years. Wow. Um, when you started There were five of us. I think I was the fifth. Yeah. And then, and now we have I think like 38 employees. Yep. Somewhere around there. So how great. And Kelsey is so good with client servicing and client just organizing projects and things that are needed and project management.
[00:01:00] And she avoided becoming the manager of all of our financial services people for a long time. And, we tried a couple different structures. And finally, I think Cassie eventually just told you, like, you, you really need to do this job. Basically, Kelsey runs the whole show anyways. And so her title finally matched that You guys are nice. Yeah, managing people can be a daunting thought, but. She does very, very well managing people. I feel like the people who don't want to be managers are usually the best managers. Yeah. Because they actually care about people. And anyway, Kelsey does a fantastic job. I appreciate that. Yeah. Today we are talking about naming beneficiaries and we brought Kelsey in because Kelsey oversees all of our processes. She has How many people are on the financial services team? Five. Okay. So five different individuals that are aligned with our financial advisors and. If our clients send through a beneficiary form, or usually what happens is they say to Kelsey's team, we need to update the beneficiaries. This is what they
[00:02:00] need to look like. And your team then creates the paperwork, gets signatures and processes, right? Correct. Even more so when there is a death, Kelsey's team is the one handling. The process of moving the funds over. So Kelsey has seen the ideal scenario when people do it correctly, how easy it can be. And she's also seen, you know, the nightmare side of it, how tricky it can be when people don't do it correctly, and how ironic that the one scenario that she complained about the most was mine. That's so true. So we'll get into that a little bit later. But moving forward today is about naming beneficiaries. We've already covered the estate plan that everyone should have. That was season five, episode one, all of season five is estate planning and season five, episode two. Will and trusts today is naming beneficiaries for episode three, and then we will cover estate taxes, advanced trust strategies. That's with Eric Widing. That one's gonna be really good, and I say it's gonna be really good because we already recorded it and we heard it and he was awesome. Sometimes we have to do these when we can
[00:03:00] schedule them anyway. Five six is preventing a family disaster. So we'll talk about some of the main things that people worry about there. Let's dive into naming beneficiaries. This can be very confusing. It sounds simple, so it's easy to mess up in a couple of ways. The most common way to mess up your beneficiary designations is to not have them. Mm-hmm. I feel like that's the most common way, and it's tricky because some IRA account applications require, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, so at least it was this way years ago where the IRA applications at many brokerage firms, they had it built into the application where you named your beneficiaries.But then the non IRA accounts, like an individual or joint account, it wasn't part of the application. Has that changed Kelsey, or is that still that way? That's still that way. So if you have an individual or a joint account or something that's not a retirement account, you may not even realize that you need to put beneficiaries on it because it's not part of the application process for many institutions.So, Forgetting to name them. That's probably
[00:04:00] before we dive into all the options. That's probably the number one issue. Mm-hmm. And we have seen IRAs open without beneficiaries before. Oh really? Yeah. They've kind of slid through weird. Yeah. And I think people's bank accounts and their 401ks, I think those can often go where.You know, you set up a bank account when you're young, and then as you go through life, you forget to update it when you get married or when you have children or grandchildren. So not only naming the beneficiaries, but updating 'em I think is a big thing. Right? Yeah. Okay. So we deal with a lot of retirement planning, so we're going to cover a lot of the options. Around retirement accounts, and I wanted to just talk about spouses first, and then we'll talk about inherited IRAs for the most part. So we're gonna talk about retirement accounts first, and then we'll cover everything else because retirement accounts are the most complex when it comes to naming your beneficiary. Everything else, you know, we always hear, you know, get your trust set up. And apply everything and put your trust on everything, which is the right
[00:05:00] advice for most everything. The retirement accounts, that's where we run into problems. So we're gonna talk about why we see some problems with retirement accounts and the tax rules around that. And then generally we'll talk about a few other just key things that people need to understand around other assets, like your trust, your home, your bank accounts, other things. Okay? So when. The government does not want us to just pass retirement account money from generation to generation to generation without actually taking the money out because they are able to, to tax it on the way out. So you have to take minimum distributions and individual who reaches 73 years old. Now, though that age has been changing, but just if nobody dies, if you get old enough, they force you to take money out of your account. But if someone passes away, it doesn't matter how old the beneficiary is. You are likely to be subject to some withdrawal requirement. We're gonna talk
[00:06:00] about the options, and especially with spouses that may change. But that's the first thing, is to understand that a withdrawal will come and that The second thing to understand is that spouses have the most options. So especially if your spouse passes away, it's time to pause before you actually just go in and. Sign and move things. And a lot of the firms that provide paperwork, I mean, Kelsey, you see this all the time. Let's say that someone has an annuity or an investment account and the firm sends them paperwork. How much guidance do these big firms provide in terms of like, here are your options and here's what you can do. Absolutely none. Right. And the paperwork's a little confusing. Super confusing. Mm-hmm. I mean, even for me, sometimes I'll look at a form that I'm from a company that I'm not familiar with, and. Wonder, but yeah, you end up figuring it out. But not, not a lot of guidance and I, I feel like a lot of these institutions will focus a more on what they're
[00:07:00] good at. Meaning an insurance company will focus more on things like, do you want to take this as a lifetime annuity payment? Do you want to take this as a five-year payment? Tenure. Do you want to continue the policy? Do you want these writers to stay on it? Like those are all insurance related discussions, but none of them cover in What legal structure do you want that money? Like is that an inherited IRA? Is that assumed as your own? Are you just dissolving the account entirely so that that's the first thing to even pause? Take a step back and understand the tax consequences. Of how you take that money out. A spouse can claim an IRA as their own. The spouse is the only individual that has that option. So if my parents passed away and I inherited an IRA from them, I can't just say, cool, I'm just gonna drop that into my own IRA. You have to be a spouse to do that, and in some cases, that's the right move to make. But think about it for a second. You can't take money out of your own
[00:08:00] IRA until you reach 59 and a half. And by the way, I'm saying a few things here that there are exceptions to. So please don't like, there are ways to get money out of it. Before 59 and a half. We did an episode on that Tricks to early retirement, but, but don't hold us to like that standard. What we're doing is we're talking about 99 times out of a hundred. This is what we run into. So our exceptions, but. You're not gonna be taking money out of your own IRA before 59 and a half, or you'll be taxed and penalized on the growth. You could, as a spouse, keep the money in an inherited IRA until you reach 59 and a half and then claim it as your own. So, especially young widows and widows, usually it makes sense to leave it in what's called an inherited IRA. You can't just leave it alone though. You still have to make a change. So, Kelsey, maybe walk us through that process. Like let's say you have. An individual in their forties who passes away, they leave a spouse behind who's 38 years old, 40 year old, had a retirement account of some type. What are you doing for the 38 surviving spouse first
[00:09:00] to open an inherited IRA? Yeah, it's actually quite simple. It's just an inherited IRA application with a death certificate. That's really it. And if it's the same custodian, then funds just journal over as is got it. Okay. So you provide the death certificate and they have to be named as a beneficiary and they assume it, or they move it into an inherited IRA. So that's different than if 38 year old spouse creates their own IRA and then asks that the money be moved from the deceased spouse's account to their own. So I ran into a gal who we thought she wasn't gonna need money before 59 and a half, but we weren't sure. And it was such a like, can you imagine losing your spouse has three kids and has no clue what her life is gonna look like for the next 10, 15 years? And she was about that far away from 59 and a half. So it made sense to move her money to an inherited IRA because if she takes a withdrawal from the inherited IRA, yes, it's taxed as income,
[00:10:00] but she doesn't take the 10% penalty. If she moves it to her own IRA, it's income plus the 10% penalty if she withdraws before 59 and a half. So that's the first consideration as a spouse. Is, how old are you and how likely is it that you're going to need that money at a certain age? Okay. So then if you've gotten through that, then let's talk about just generally how the required minimum distributions work. Because a, a spouse can avoid a lot of those required minimum distributions, but everybody else can't. And this used to be really lenient. They used to have this table that, let's say somebody was 25 years old. The IRS would figure out how many years they were gonna live between 25 to the rest of their life expectancy. And they only had to take out a small portion every year for the rest of their life. And then the secure act came out and Laura looked this up, I don't wanna take credit for this. We were both staring at each other, like what was the date that that happened? And, but
[00:11:00] this was back at the end of 2019. Mm-hmm. And early 2020. Anybody who passes away after the end of 19 or inside 2020 and beyond, they're now limited to just 10 years. They call it stretch. You can only stretch those withdrawals. For up to 10 years for an individual, meaning the whole account has to be out of that inherited IRA within 10 years. Yeah, and the cool thing is, I mean, before you had to take out a certain amount each year, but now you can control when you wanna do it. In that 10 years, you could take out the whole amount in the first five years or maybe in the 10th year. So you have a little bit of control there, but it all has to be out within 10 years, so it. It gives you opportunity for some planning, but you do wanna be thinking ahead, especially if you inherit a pretty large portion into that inherited IRA, it can affect your taxes, so you wanna do some planning around it. These days we see IRAs of $2 million somewhat frequently. Mm-hmm. That's a lot of money to have to take out over a decade period, especially if
[00:12:00] you're already working and you're throwing that income on top of your regular income. You could be hitting high tax brackets. So to your point, Laura, let's say that you planned on retiring in four or five years. It may make sense to delay all those withdrawals until the sixth year and then start to use that as your retirement income because you'll slot it in at lower tax brackets. Mm-hmm. And then maybe this goes without saying, but let's just clarify. You don't have to wait at all. Mm-hmm. You could take all the money out at any time, and we see that happen all the time, especially with small accounts. Someone might inherit like a five or a $10,000 IRA. And at that point they're like, I'm not maintaining this $5,000 account, right? For a decade. Let's go ahead and just take that out and, and that's the case for deaths that happened before 2019 as well. I mean, if they're stretching it over your lifetime, those could be really small RMDs that you don't even wanna have to deal with or required minimum distributions.So, yeah, you can liquidate it upfront, but if you don't want it to be liquidated, you need to do what Kelsey said, set up an inherited or a beneficiary IRA to roll the funds into
[00:13:00] right up front, and then you can plan your withdrawals from there. So far we've talked about people like spouses or individuals. When you throw a trust in here, it definitely complicates the picture. It makes it a lot more complicated from a servicing standpoint, which Kelsey will tell us a little bit about, but it makes the tax considerations a little bit more complicated. So I'm gonna first lay out why people would name trust versus an individual and then maybe Kelsey, maybe you can take us to like real life, cuz that's what really matters. I think sometimes us advisors and estate planners are like, oh, it'll be really fancy because we'll do this and then we'll do that. And then all of a sudden rubber hits the road and the individual is thinking, I cannot believe they talked me into this. This is so complicated to deal with. Yeah, we run into that a lot. And just to clarify, you can. List, obviously individuals, but you can list a trust. You can also list a charity or an organization as a beneficiary. So you can have your spouse
[00:14:00] listed as primary, and then you could list a charity that you wanted as your contingent. That's such a good catch, Laura. So talk. Let's think about the scenario. We know people who. Pay money to their church regularly. Mm-hmm. People who give to hospitals regularly, like it's a part of their life, they view it as a duty. So if that's the case and you know that upon death, you would hope that some money goes to charity. The best money to be given to a charity is IRA money. Because no one pays taxes on it. Mm-hmm. Whereas if you gave away like part of your house to a charity, that's, I mean, it's, I'm not gonna say it's bad, I'm just saying it's not as advantageous to everyone involved as if you put it, you know, you give the IRA away, nobody has to pay taxes on it. If you give part of your house or a bank account or something like that, and then your kids get the IRA, well then they only get maybe 75% of that cuz they have to pay taxes on it, depending on their rate. So if you wanna give some of your assets away to a charity, Give those pre-tax dollars away to the charity. Yeah. As a charity, they don't have to pay taxes on it. Okay,
[00:15:00] so let's talk about the ideas. So you go through all the work of creating a trust, and then it feels really weird to say, great, I'm really glad I did all this work with the trust. I made these tough decisions. The attorney charged me a decent amount. We argued between our spouses about who was gonna get our kids. You know, you go through all this work and then you get to the point where, Now you talk to somebody who says, well, I'm not so certain that's the best thing for you to put that on your IRA beneficiaries, but let's talk about why people do. The reason people might do this is if they have young children. You don't really want your kids just directly inheriting a bunch of money. And they may not be legally old enough to even inherit it anyway. And a trust will prevent the courts from deciding who is in charge of that IRA if they're too young. So that's one benefit of naming a trust. Two, if you are concerned about that money being spent in the wrong way or going too quickly, you can have more control through a trust. I had a client who.
[00:16:00] He was the trustee for his niece, so his sister passed away and his niece was the beneficiary of that money, and it was, this has been a long time. This has been like a decade since this happened, but there was quite a bit of money in that account. The mother, before she passed, she knew that her daughter had a drug
problem, and so she put in restrictions where she had to pass drug tests every certain number of years. It's been long enough. I can't remember the exact rules, but. Every so many years she had to pass drug tests and she kept failing. And it wasn't just one, it was like six tests in a row. Surprise, over a course of like three months or something like that. So she made it really hard and to make sure that her daughter wasn't just gonna spend all that money on drugs. And then after she turned, like it was every five years, and then I think when she hit 40, if she didn't pass at that time, the money went to. Somebody else entirely. And I was around for the last, about five years of that process, and I did see that, that that money went to somebody else and that was her wishes. She did not want that
[00:17:00] money just going to drugs. Had she named her daughter directly, that's what would've happened. There wouldn't have been the option to control the timing and provide for drug tests, even if she had the trust. But she still listed her daughter as a beneficiary. It would've gone to her daughter, you know Exactly. Know what's listed as a beneficiary on your account. Trumps what you have in your trust. You have to list the trust as a beneficiary for those trust rules to come into play. Yeah, great point. Great point. Okay, second marriages, that's another reason you might consider a trust because you want to control it, often in a trust through a second marriage, you'll say, these assets are available for my current spouse. However, when she passes away, We want that money to go to my kids from my first marriage rather than maybe down her family line because it happens so often it does happen. Gonna say, oh, I, I just, you know, know somebody where this happened. It was a second marriage. The second wife was the beneficiary on the counts. She inherited everything and then completely wrote off the
[00:18:00] first spouse's kids. And so they got nothing of it, and it's caused a lot of drama in the family and a lot of hardship in there because that spouse, she has full control of the assets. If she's listed as beneficiary, most of the time, this is not on purpose. Think about it. We talked already about the fact that the spouse can inherit that as their own IRA. Mm-hmm. And oftentimes their beneficiaries on their own IRA were already set up as their own kids. And so it's not like they're purposefully saying like, I want my husband's kids to get any of this. They just listen to someone that says, oh, the best thing for you would be just to move it to your own IRA. They sign a few docs, move it to their own IRA and have no idea. They just wrote out the spouse's first marriage kids out of the assets. So it's a problem. We've also seen on the other side a little bit of drama where the spouse lists their kids instead of their second Oh yeah. Spouse. And it's always like, why? Why did you do that? Or, Yeah. Why is it set up that way? So there's either way, you know, you're, you could run into some tension.
[00:19:00] Yeah. I have a client who is that way. He wanted his money to go to his kids. So instead of making it complicated with a trust, he just named his kids as beneficiaries. I. Then he went out and bought a million dollar life insurance policy for his current wife. And it was kind of his way of saying like, I don't want this to be complicated, and when I pass away, I don't want you guys to hope that my wife dies to get your assets. So we're just gonna, we're gonna separate all this and give everybody money all at once. Okay? So if we boil it down to why would you name a trust, it is because your beneficiaries are too young to handle the assets. Or you need some sort of control around how that money gets distributed beyond the grave. And then why you might name an individual. And by the way, we see individuals way more often named as beneficiaries on IRAs than we do trusts. And the reason is it is so much more simple to have an individual on there. These brokerage firms are not
[00:20:00] really equipped. To even like have the trust be an owner. Sometimes I feel like they have to make up new fields in their software to even put the names in the right place, and they're not used to a trust name with a tax ID number versus. A and a trustee. So you've got the beneficiary for whom the assets are set aside, the trustee, and a trust tax ID number. Those are three different tax ID numbers. Which one do you put in the tax ID? Number of the account and service reps at these big brokerage firms have been there for two months. They don't know what to do. It gets so messy. And Kelsey, you deal with this the most, so maybe you can tell us a little bit about it. I mean, you kind of covered it right there. So we, as soon as someone sets up a trust, it's kind of funny actually. We instantly get calls. I have a trust, now I wanna update my beneficiaries. They'll just kind of bypass the advisor and call the staff to get the paperwork going. The staff has been trained to pause and include the advisor because updating a beneficiary
[00:21:00] to a trust, especially on an IRA, is. Not necessarily a red flag, but a flag for us. What issue did we run into though? My one client? That you were talking about your headaches, like without any specifics that people would know what happened? Because I've kind of forgotten, to be honest with you. You could. Yeah. That one. There are a whole other separate basket of issues with that one. But, and to be fair that a lot of this was because the money wasn't under our stewardship. Yes. That all the stuff that we had seemed to go through really quickly. Yes. But I couldn't convince this guy to at least let us help with the other assets. Yeah. And anyway, keep going. But he, at the other firm had named on every single account that he had. The beneficiary was listed as the trust. So as we were trying to bring these assets over, we were trying to re-register to the trust at the previous firm. But this firm was, like you had mentioned earlier, not equipped to open an IRA only in the name of a trust. By a trust. Yeah. And
[00:22:00] we are not, and we weren't inside that company, so we couldn't use our service team contacts to push it through. Yeah. We weren't authorized to talk to them to help him set up the account over there. Yeah. So we're just trying to help him set up. When I say him. So he passed away and his son helped his, his wife, you know, so Correct. So, the surviving spouse, she needed to set up accounts at the other firm and we're trying to help and they won't talk to us of course cuz we're not, not listed on the account, which is good. That's right. But man, it made it really difficult for a long Super d difficult. And just to kind of give you an example of how uncommon this is. So I've been here doing the service side of. The financial of everything. Everything, everything that has to do with your financial account. Kelsey has done, yeah, for seven years now, and I think I've maybe seen three, maybe three or four. Oh wow. IRAs opened in the name of a trust or owned by a trust, which means someone had listed the trust as a beneficiary of their IRA.
[00:23:00] I think we're gonna run into it more as our clients get older and pass away. Yeah. Cuz I already know quite a few clients that have it set up that way for a specific reason. But to give you context, we have 2000 households roughly, and in each one of those there's probably at least two or three accounts. So we're talking about five to 6,000 accounts. And you've seen three, you say? Yeah. So to boil it down, if you do have specific language in a trust, you know you have minors or you're worried about, uh, spenders or whatnot. It's not bad to list your trust. It's good to help have control over it. It just can make things trickier. So if your trust language says, I just want this to go to the kids anyways, you know, it's basically just flowing through the trust to be given straight to the beneficiaries. Just list your, your kids or your beneficiaries, the individuals on. Your account instead of the trust. That's a good point. One more thing. I wanted you first to all think about the trust versus individual as a
[00:24:00] complexity, simplicity control, lack of control conversation, because that's more important than the next thing I'm going to tell you. We never wanna let the tax tail wag the dog. But the taxes are also different depending on how the trust is written. So we're not gonna go deep into this, but some trusts will allow you to preserve that 10 year stretch, meaning you could withdraw it over 10 years, but some trusts will force you into five years. So that 2 million I r a. Could be coming out at $400,000 a year instead of 200. Uh, obviously that's a big account. Big numbers, but the point is it's always nice to have options. If they wanna take it over five, great. But it'd be nice to give them the options of over 10 years if possible. There are some restrictions around how that trust needs to be listed. Maybe instead of going into those, There's four main criteria. Typically, I would boil it down to it needs to be a legitimate trust. It needs to become irrevocable when the owner dies, meaning it can't be changed after that
[00:25:00] point. And then the third one is probably the most important. The beneficiaries need to be identifiable, eligible, and legally named. So they have to be already in there. They have to be real. Entities, people, um, sometimes people will throw like a charity. We talked about charities being the best mm-hmm. For IRAs. But then if you mix a charity with people, it can break your ability to stretch over 10 years. So it, it can complicate it a fair amount. In the trust. In the trust. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And this is one where now I'd have to, I'd have to look back. I think, Laura, that may actually be even at the IRA level, like if you name the trust as 80% beneficiary, And a charity as a 20% beneficiary at the ir. I mean, I can't remember now. Oh, but that for some reason is a red flag in my mind that I would have to go dig into and confirm. But the bottom line is, if it's done just right, you can stretch it. But what if you have like 12 kids, which happens sometimes. I don't know why I picked that number. Let's start with four in Utah. Yeah. Let's say you have four kids. Why did I go 12? If you have four kids,
[00:26:00] And there's a pretty big gap between their ages then, then they, well, you know what, it's just 10 years. Uh, it used to be that. They forced you to use the oldest kid's age, but now that it's 10 years, that doesn't matter anymore. I just went down a rabbit hole we didn't need to go down. Okay, let's keep going. So those are the main issues with regard to trusts versus individuals and the taxes associated with it. So a couple other, these are just random, the kind of button them up type issues around beneficiaries. Laura, maybe talk to us a little bit about primary. Versus contingent beneficiaries and how people can use those. Yeah. Yeah. These are nice because maybe you want someone to get the money, but if something were to happen to both of you, then where do you want the money to go? That's where the primary contingent comes into play. So primary, you can actually list as many people as you want as a primary. I feel like most often we see a spouse primary 100%, so they will get everything. But you could list two people as your primary beneficiaries. Then if all of your
[00:27:00] primary beneficiaries were to not be alive at time of death, then they'll look to your contingent. And then same thing, you can add as many contingencies as you want. You can add whatever percentage you want to each, maybe 20% to somebody, 80% to somebody else. Maybe I have a favorite kid. You want them to get more? No. Or you can just do it equal usually, most. The time we see it is equal. I do have a client that I've, I've watched her change her beneficiary percentages based. Really? Oh yeah. Based on who shows up for the based, just who based. She's mad at that year. That's funny. And you, that's a good point. You can update your beneficiaries almost anytime. It's just a signed form, so don't feel like it's set in stone. Another thing to be aware of is per stirpes, so you can mark per stirpes on your beneficiary. Say you have. Four children, and your four children also have their own children. You can mark them as per stirpes, which means if something were to happen to that child, their portion of the inheritance will go on to their biological children. Not their spouse, so not your son-in-law,
[00:28:00] but their children. If you don't mark that purse stirpes, their portion of the inheritance is just distributed among the other beneficiaries. I'm sure that that word has some long-term like, like significance. That makes sense why it's stirpes. It sounds like a disease to me. It does, and I feel, but think of it like per bloodline. That's how I remember it. So like per stirpes is per bloodline. So even, even if your kids are remarried, it has to go to your bloodline. So it goes, it doesn't go your kid to the your kid's spouse. It goes your kid to your kid's kids because they have your bloodline Anyway. Perfect. Um, what else would we do? We talked about changes. Scenarios, you should revisit your beneficiaries if anybody in your family passes away. What else? Why? Why else might you need to revisit beneficiaries? Can you guys think of any? I think I just see from a servicing and processing standpoint the most success when these are
[00:29:00] revisited at least once a year. Just cuz things change and especially keeping. The conversation open with your spouse. I mean, we had a widow, unexpected widow come in and her spouse had passed and she did not know anything about any of his accounts, who it was going to. She was the beneficiary, but she didn't know. She very well could have not been right. Yeah. And she wouldn't have known it. And I could just see it was a very confusing and stressful situation for her. So. Hmm. So letting your kids know, or if you list somebody as a beneficiary, Mary, maybe giving them a heads up. Yeah. Hey, I've put you here. This is who you need to contact. You know, if I were to pass away, and they'll help you. Got it. Okay. The types of assets that need beneficiaries, I think we can cover this and, and help you to know, you know, which things to check first. So anything that's a contract account, that means anything that we've really talked about today. Bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, anything
[00:30:00] like that, you can list a beneficiary on it and you should. So if you haven't ever talked to your bank, for example, that one's a really easy one, and you keep a decent amount of cash at the bank. You should go check to see who is the beneficiary on that. And then that's different than listing things in your will. Let's just point out some people think, oh, I'm good cuz I've got it all in my will. If it's listed in your will, a will is just a set of instructions for a judge. So that means you're sitting in probate. I'm not saying a will is bad. I have a will. You should have a will. And if you do it right in conjunction with a trust and with beneficiaries, everything just gets buttoned up really nice and clean with your will. But any asset that you have in any type of account should have beneficiaries first, and then your trust helps clean up the rest and your will helps clean up things that are not worth listing on all of those. And in those two other documents, beneficiaries and trust. Let's see, homes in Utah. Things are changing a little bit here, but generally it's best practice. If you have real
[00:31:00] estate, you should have a trust and you should put the real estate in the name of the trust, meaning you actually have to go change the title at the county to be to say, like My Family trust says it owns our house with the county. And that way if my wife and I both passed away, the trustee is my father-in-law first. And he'd be able to step in without having too much hassle and he wouldn't have to go through probate to just start handling what to do with the house. Life insurance, we haven't talked about that. Mm-hmm. Life insurance is, is usually one of the quickest to pay out. And it usually can be one of the best ways to help with funeral expenses. So that's one where for sure you wanna make sure that you have, if you have like term or permanent life insurance that your beneficiaries are on there. Basically anything you get a statement for should have some sort of beneficiary on it, or it should be owned by the trust. Okay, so I think that's it. Kelsey. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Hopefully I don't cause you any more problems. Again,
[00:32:00] in all fairness, it wasn't with us and it was super frustrating for both of us. But yeah. And for you guys, more importantly, make sure you look at your beneficiaries. I think in my experience, people go five plus years without looking at them. Mm-hmm. I mean, even every two or three years, you're probably gonna catch most of the changes. Take a peak at 'em, and then if you have questions about your particular situation around whether you should name your trust or not. You know, people like Laura, we can ask a few questions and know pretty quick whether or not your trust should be on there, and whether you should sacrifice a little tax control for, you know, the, the control of the money flow, or which way you should go. Thanks for joining. This podcast is intended for informational purpose only and is not a substitute for personal advice from capita. This is not a recommendation offer. Or solicitation to buy or sell, any security past performance is not indicative
[00:33:00] or for of future results, there can be no assurance that investment objectives will be achieved.Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, including the loss of money invested, therefore, It should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, including the investments or investment strategies recommended or proposed by capita will be profitable. Further capita does not provide legal or. Tax advice. Please consult with your legal or tax professional for advice prior to implementing any strategies discussed during this podcast, certain of the information discussed during this podcast. Is based upon
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