In the July 2023 episode of What Waymark Can Do for You, we focus on the crucial yet often overlooked aspect of financial planning: beneficiaries. As people gather with family and venture on travels, it's an ideal time to revisit beneficiary designations in your accounts, life insurance, and estate planning documents to ensure they align with your current wishes.
Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of What Can Waymark Do for You in July 2023. So, July is typically the month that we get together with friends and family and in the very distant part of your brain and out to the periphery is probably financial planning stuff. But there is a reason why you might want to start thinking about some financial planning stuff. And in July, and mainly that is beneficiaries. You may be meeting with some friends and family, and they may be some of the beneficiaries of some of your accounts or life insurance or estate planning documents. And you may want to take a look to see or potentially even second guess some of those beneficiary designations that you do end up putting down to make sure that they're actually correct.
Another way of looking at it is you're going to be traveling a lot, you know, some people are traveling out of state, some people are traveling out of the country. And you want to make sure that again, those beneficiaries are all squared away. So this is a good month for you to start thinking about beneficiaries. And just making sure that the beneficiaries that you do have listed there are the beneficiaries that you actually want, because remember, beneficiaries are some of the most important and powerful parts of your estate plan. In most cases, they actually trump everything. So even if your will says one thing, your trust says another thing, the beneficiaries actually rule. So you definitely want to make sure those beneficiaries are correct.
So that's where we can step in and help you out with that, at least on the Waymark side of things. If you do have any accounts that are with us, we can certainly run a report showing what your current beneficiaries are listed as and make sure that they're consistent with what your wishes are. One of the biggest things is obviously, if you're married, typically your primary beneficiary is your spouse, however, a lot of people unbeknownst to them don't actually have a contingent beneficiary. And again, if you're traveling with your spouse, and God forbid, something bad happens, if your accounts don't know where to go, then they'll default to probate court and that's one of the things that most people are trying to avoid. So again, very important to keep those beneficiary designations up to date and also to make sure and sniff out any potential situations where you may not have declared a beneficiary when you thought you had, so let us help you out in that regard. More than happy to run that report and sit down with you to decide or to discuss, you know, who best to put in those spots.
Hope you have a nice July enjoy the summer and we'll talk soon.
Brendan is the Managing Director for Waymark Wealth Management. He has extensive experience in comprehensive wealth management. His focus includes retirement planning, behavioral finance, investment portfolio construction, education funding, insurance & risk management, taxes, charitable giving, and estate planning. Brendan has an ability to take clients' complex visions and distill them down to simple action plans, helping them move from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.
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