It’s Richard Morgan at Morgan and DiSalvo, another in our series of Back to the Basics video newsletters. So this topic is very important. How you own your assets and the proper beneficiary designations is key to make sure that your plan actually works. So if your documents go this way, and your assets go this way, that’s what actually happens under law. It doesn’t matter if people believe it shouldn’t have happened. It doesn’t believe … if mommy and daddy didn’t intend for that to happen, that’s what’s actually happened.

So you need to own your assets in a manner that the assets go where they’re supposed to go. Are they supposed to go to the spouse outright, or the kids outright? So if that was the case, a beneficiary designation is fine, a joint ownership or a survivorship is fine. But we’re gonna get assets to go into trust, they have to get into the trust, which means you have to own them in a different way.

So the key is that you need to really consider how to own those assets and get the proper beneficiary designations to really make sure your plan’s gonna work as you intend.

It’s Richard Morgan at Morgan and DiSalvo.