What should I consider when choosing a beneficiary or contingent beneficiary?
Well, the primary beneficiary in most cases is the spouse; if you are married it's typically your spouse. Occasionally I come across people that have children from a prior marriage and they really want the life insurance for those kids in particular. It depends on your particular needs and you have to express those needs to the insurance agent so that he understands what you're trying to accomplish. One of things that are very important is, let's say that you have a husband and wife, they buy a life insurance policy of themselves and their concern is that in case either one of them dies they want the kids taking care of wealth. So the guardian that they've chosen for their children it's even spell out in their will. The wife's sister, she's a wonderful person. Instead of leaving the beneficiary, the contingent beneficiary the children they decide to leave the money to the sister. Sounds like a logical idea; the problem is if the sister dies the money now belongs to her husband. Her husband could be a great guy and honor the commitment that her sister had to her children but might not do so. In general it's very important when you have children do not only look your beneficiary destination but you know you might go in a hurry to spell exactly what you want because many scenarios, children may not be capable in handling large sums of money. When you have a sophisticated larger estate where people are wealthy and there's lot of money involved, even when there's cases whether not a lot of money is involved. If you want to make sure that money does what you wanted to do, under almost any circumstance you probably is worth spending a thousand dollars or more with an attorney to write up a special type of trust or will for you to specify exactly how the proceeds of the life insurance is paid out.
