Many times when I’m working with the family after the death of a loved one, I do what we call fill up the buckets. The first thing I have to identify is, is the different types of assets that the family has, whether it’s a house, a checking account, a brokerage account, an insurance policy, something in a safety deposit box or car.
And what we’re doing is we’re not investing. We’re just trying to see how things are titled. A few things we look for is if it was a joint ownership, if it’s joint ownership with the spouse in most traditional ways, they call it survivor-ship or such, then that means that the spouse that survives still has access to that asset. They’re on equal footing.
They own as much as the other. So that’s important to let the person know that if you owned it jointly with your spouse, that you’re going to be able to gain access to that for what you need going forward. The second thing, though, is we get that it doesn’t always make sense to have joint ownership on certain accounts or it doesn’t make sense to always have joint ownership with your children on certain accounts for tax reliability issues.
So if it was an individual account, then what we do is we keep our fingers crossed that they named the beneficiary. Because the beneficiary tells the bank or whoever where you want that to go, you hear beneficiaries as POD, TOD, pay on death, all the on death arrangements. So even if the will says leave everything to Mickey Mouse, but the beneficiaries say your spouse or your children, the beneficiaries controlled.
So if it’s joint ownership, you don’t need a court to help us with the account. We still have access. If we have a beneficiary, we don’t need the court to help us with the account. It would flow to the children. The third way to transfer assets is through trusts. They’re not for everybody, but they have a purpose and one of those purposes is for probate avoidance can kind of tidy things up and simplify things because I always look at the trusts like a box and that box survives me.
So the house or the account is in that box. I don’t need the court to tell us what to do. You already gave your trustee, which is usually a family member, the surviving spouse or a child. You gave them permission to handle the assets. So again, we’re looking at how things are titled to keep our fingers crossed that we don’t have to go through a probate process to transfer them.