A thorough estate plan is critical to protecting yourself, as well as your loved ones and ensuring that everyone has peace of mind especially after you have passed. When you create an estate plan, you are assuming your beneficiaries are going to outlive you, which is not always the case. The most common question is, who inherits if the beneficiary has passed away? It’s a great question to ask, because while you are assuming that your beneficiaries are going to outlive you they do not always, and this is where it helps to have an extremely thorough estate plan.
A beneficiary is going to be anyone at the creator of an estate plan named in their estate plan who will ultimately receive the inheritance upon the decedent’s death. Beneficiaries are a critical portion of every estate plan because they are the integral reason to create your estate plan, otherwise you just wouldn’t haven’t seen you would just let your estate go up for grabs after your death. You should always talk to an estate planning lawyer, such as the ones available at the Iowa Law Group if you have questions.
The entire reason to create an estate plan is so that you can decide who inherits what from you.
In a comprehensive estate plan there are going to be different types of beneficiaries, such as the primary beneficiary or beneficiaries that can be more than one primary, as well as contingent beneficiaries. And of course not all beneficiaries have to be individuals, or classes of individuals such as grandchildren. You can also name an organization or charity as your beneficiary.
A primary beneficiary is the personal organization that is going to inherit first from a trust or will. I guess you’d say they get the first pick. A contingent beneficiary is the person organization doing here if the primary beneficiary is predeceased. Sometimes the contingent beneficiaries aptly called second in line as they inherent second.
So the question regarding the answer today is what happens to a will or trust when a beneficiary dies. When the beneficiary of a trust or will dies and the person that established the trust or had the will drafted must amend their estate plan. An estate planning lawyer can help you with this process, and in answering this question.
Although a beneficiary passing is never planned for a thorough state plan to take this into consideration when writing the plan up. When naming beneficiaries for an estate plan there are two common paths for their inheritance to take, and both have to consider the possibility of the beneficiary dying before the estate owner. The first way to name a beneficiary, is to say their inherent lapses which means that if the beneficiary passed away prior to the creator of the estate plan then the inheritance is no longer affected. The second way is to name beneficiaries for an estate plan and to say their inheritance passes per stirpes. This means that if a beneficiary dies before you do, their share of their estate is going to automatically and evenly pass on to their children or child or other descendants of this person.