How to Claim and Use Life Insurance

Many people have life insurance, and they have it for a multitude of reasons.  These include funeral costs, liquidity in an estate, help paying off taxes and so on.  Whatever your reason for having it, I wanted to talk about how to make a claim on it, and separately, what to do with it once you have.  You can see more at Kiplinger’s recent article entitled “What Is the Best Way for a Widow to Use Life Insurance Proceeds?”

When making a claim, you’ll need a couple of things.  First and foremost, perhaps blindly obvious, is that your beneficiaries need to know you have it.  If an insurance company becomes aware of a death they might reach out to named beneficiaries, but that is a big assumption.  So, your life insurance beneficiaries or whoever may claim the insurance needs to know it exists.

Holding that aside, the person entitled to the money will start by contacting the insurance company.  The company will send or direct that person on where to download a form to claim the insurance.  Beneficiaries typically need to provide proof of who they are, a death certificate for the insured (which in most places is issued within a few weeks of death) and other information about how to pay the insurance.  For example, some companies ask if you want to turn it into an investment fund at their financial institution, others arrange how to cut the check and so on.

It is worth noting that your executor or trustee won’t have the right to do this unless the estate or the trust is the beneficiary of the life insurance.  All told, the process typically takes something like 30 days.

Now, what to do with the insurance proceeds varies based upon the purpose and need of the life insurance.  I’m also going to assume for now that the insurance isn’t being paid to a trust which is designed to hold assets long term such as a descendant’s trusts.  That might have different concerns.

So, with that said, here are some ideas on how to use the life insurance.

Funeral Costs. Use life insurance money to cover these costs to decrease your financial strain.  Most funeral companies actually have you purchase a small insurance policy in order to prepay a funeral.

Ongoing Expenses. This is especially true when one spouse dies, but living expenses do not stop. Your income is frequently reduced. In fact, after the death of a spouse, household income generally declines by about 40% due to changes in Social Security benefits, spouse’s retirement income and earnings. The death benefit from a life insurance policy can help provide the funds you need to help cover your mortgage, car payment, utilities, food, clothing and health care premiums.

Debts. You are generally not personally responsible for paying off the debts of the decedent. However, when an estate does not have enough funds to pay all the debts, any gifts that were supposed to be paid out to beneficiaries will most likely be reduced. Note that you may be responsible for certain types of debt, such as debt that is jointly owned or a loan that you have co-signed. Talk to an experienced estate attorney to understand the laws of your state, so that you know where you stand concerning all debts.  By way of example, you have very few responsibilities to pay a decedent’s debts in Texas.

Taxes.  As a tie-in to debts, some people use life insurance to give an influx of liquidity to pay estate taxes.  This often helps when an estate is large due to real estate or businesses or other illiquid assets.  The IRS of course wants the tax paid in cash, so life insurance gives you the cash to do so without liquidating other assets.

Create an Emergency Fund. Life insurance can help build a liquid emergency fund, which should cover three to six months of expenses.

Supplement Your Retirement. When one spouse passes, the survivor becomes much more economically vulnerable. To retire, a person typically needs 80% of their preretirement income to live comfortably.  So, insurance provides and extra supplement to cover that need.

Reference: Kiplinger (Dec. 17, 2021) “What Is the Best Way for a Widow to Use Life Insurance Proceeds?”

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Golfing May Reduce the Risk of Dementia

Leisure-time exercises like golfing may reduce the risk of dementia for older men according to a recent study.

Depending on who is reading this, you are either going to be thrilled with me, or angry at me for giving an excuse to someone.  But, we here at The Galligan Law Firm value the health of our clients, and with that, I want to share the results of this important study.

Older men now have a great excuse to spend more timing golfing.  A recent study suggests playing golf may cut the risk of getting dementia according to The Daily Mail’s recent article entitled, “Playing GOLF could cut your risk of getting dementia by a third, study claims.”

Men 60 years and older who regularly exercise at a ‘leisurely’ pace, such as golf, were up to 37% less likely to be diagnosed with the disorder, a Japanese study found. Experts say this may be due to the quick mental calculations done when lining up a putt or avoiding a bunker which may help prevent cognitive decline. Researchers also say the social aspect of playing golf with others may help stave off dementia, in addition to the benefits of physical exercise. However, this effect was not found for women who played more games of golf or other similar activities, like tennis or gardening.

Previous research has suggested factors like social isolation also increase the chances of getting dementia, with a lack of personal interaction with others a key risk factor. I’ve read other studies which examined towns with an abnormal number of individuals who reach 100 years of age.  Those studies similarly found that social interaction in those towns (small, tight-knit communities) encouraged long-term health.

In this study, researchers at the Center for Public Health Sciences in Tokyo reviewed survey data collected between 2000 to 2003 from 43,896 Japanese seniors. On average, they were aged 61. The survey participants were asked to detail their average levels of daily activity. Each activity was given a score, based on the energy expended doing a task. These scores were then compared to dementia diagnoses logged between 2006 and 2016.

A total of 5,010 participants were diagnosed with the condition during this time frame. The results showed no clear link between moderate to vigorous exercise and any reduced risk of dementia. However, further analysis of the same set of data showed men who did lots of ‘leisure-time’ exercise were at less risk of the disorder. Men in the top 25%— in terms of the amount of leisure-time exercise they carried out — were 37% less likely to have dementia three years after being surveyed. This risk reduction remained even after other risk factors like smoking status, alcohol intake and BMI were taken into account. Nine years after being surveyed, the more active men were 28% less likely to have a dementia diagnosis, compared to the least active.

Lead author Dr. Norie Sawada suggested leisure activities, like golf, may help older man stave off dementia through both the mental calculations required to play and the social aspect.  It is encouraging too that an active lifestyle (“leisure-time exercise”) can help without requiring extreme or vigorous exercise as we age.

Dr. Sawada also noted that ‘the social activity that accompanies leisure time physical activities, such as participation in golf competitions and enrollment in tennis circles, also has a protective association against cognitive decline and dementia.’

There is no precise way to prevent dementia. However, experts say that maintaining a healthy heart through regular exercise and eating healthy foods helps reduce the risk of the condition, and if golfing helps, so be it.

As to why women in the study did not enjoy a reduced dementia risk, Sawada thinks that they may already be getting similar benefits from their everyday activities, compared to men.

So, if there is one thing you do to help your health this weekend, let it be golfing!

Reference: Daily Mail (March 29, 2022) “Playing GOLF could cut your risk of getting dementia by a third, study claims”

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What You Shouldn’t Put in your Will

We often talk about different estate planning vehicles, such as use of trusts versus a will, and frequently about what types of provisions and powers should be including in your estate plan.  Today, I’m going to change that.  Let’s talk about what you shouldn’t put in your will, or at least, not without a lot of thought and care.  A recent article from Best Life titled “Never Include These 2 Things in Your Will, Experts Warn.” was the inspiration, but I had some different ideas.

As a quick point, I’m examining specifically what you shouldn’t have in a will.  Most of this would be applicable to trusts as well, with some caveats.

  1. Conditional gift in your will.

One thing you shouldn’t put in your will is a conditional gift.  A conditional gift is when money or property is given only when and if a specific event takes place. For instance, grandpa might leave a conditional gift for his grandchild, if she graduates college, gets a job, or gets married. These provisions are often drafted in the hopes of encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors and have a tendency to get messy.

Even the seemingly basic condition of graduating from college can turn into a major issue, if the beneficiary decides to pursue a trade or accelerates in college and is offered an excellent job before earning her degree.  Not all programs are the same, and some colleges have 5 year undergraduate programs that tie into professional services.   The cost of obtaining the inheritance may not be worth it.

Similar obstacles—and, frequently, creative workarounds from beneficiaries who want to unlock their inheritance—will also be encountered with other conditional gifts. However, there are still ways to achieve the spirit of the conditional gift without it getting complicated. Instead, give the bequest outright without any conditions but include the encouragement that the beneficiary does something specific.

Another option is to hold the gift in a trust for a beneficiary. With a trust you can designate a trustee to be in control of the assets in the trust after your death. The trustee will have discretion as to the timing and amount of distributions. You can also detail how narrow or broad that discretion should be, perhaps detailing that you hope it will be for college education.

See here for more ideas on that front:  https://galligan-law.com/how-grandparents-can-help-pay-for-college/ 

  1. Be careful with dollar amount bequests.

The article suggests that you should never include a specific dollar bequest.  I disagree that clients should never include specific dollar bequests, but I have encountered many, many estates where they are problematic, so I’m going to address it.

Specific dollar bequests often create disparate giving compared to the rest of the estate.  What I mean by this is that when you come up with the estate plan, perhaps you had $500,000 and a house, and for an easy (but not very realistic) example, let’s assume that it is all cash in a bank account.  You leave $20,000 to each of your grandkids and you had 4 at the time you prepared the plan.  As you expected it, you were giving $80,000 out of your $500,000 cash, and the rest goes to your kids (so, $420,000 for them).

Fast forward to the time the person passed.  After a long-term care stay, unfavorable stock market, enjoying their retirement and the birth of 3 more grandkids, they now are at $250,000.  So, $140,000 will go to grandkids, and $110,000 goes to the kids.  Based upon where we started, the testator likely didn’t want the grandkids to get so much more than their kids.

Even further, and this is a more common problem, is that people who use wills often have non-probate assets as part of their estate plan.  When they formulate their plan, they are thinking of the whole value of their estates, regardless of whether the will controls them or not.

So, going back to my prior example, let’s assume the $500,000 cash is actually $300,000 in IRA, $150,000 in investments for which there is a transfer on death beneficiary at the suggestion of the banker and $50,000 in cash in a bank account.  After the person dies, regardless of whether they have more grandkids or not, only the $50,000 is part of their estate plan as the IRA and investment account pay directly to their beneficiaries.  The executor doesn’t control them.  So, how does the executor pay out the $20,000 per grandkid?  Maybe sell the house?

A better option in many cases is to use percentages. In this way, your estate will self-correct for size and each beneficiary will get their proper share.  One caveat is that I disfavor that with charitable beneficiaries, but that’s its own article.

  1. Burial Provisions

There are some states where this is still relevant, but in most places you shouldn’t put burial provisions in your wills.  It’s true that it used to be that way, but over time lawyers identified a common problem.  Wills might have been left with the drafting attorney, or in a safety deposit box, or generally not found until after the person passed and was buried.  If the will said “I want to be cremated,” it was kind of too late.

Instead, many states, including Texas, provide for individuals to name a person to execute your final wishes and to include what those wishes are.  These are called appointments for the disposition of remains, and work very well as standalone documents you can share with your agents for when the time comes.

  1. Listing Property

This isn’t a problem so much as it is unnecessary or potentially confusing, but wills shouldn’t list what you own.  I typically see this in handwritten or DIY wills, but there is no reason to list what you own. In fact, it is better not to as the will is designed to work as a catch-all.  It is supposed to control and direct any of your assets remaining at death unless a contract already directs them, such as non-probate assets like retirement accounts and insurance which pass by contract.

It may also cause confusion, because if you miss something or if you list values and the values change, an executor or beneficiary might think the will only applies to that property, as opposed to everything else.  So, no need to list property or limit it in any way.

Every will is specific to the person who creates it. In order to ensure that yours is done properly, meet with an experienced estate planning attorney to create a will that benefits you and your loved ones—without any unexpected problems.

Reference: Best Life (March 20, 2022) “Never Include These 2 Things in Your Will, Experts Warn”

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