The Trust as Beneficiary Explained by Orange County Estate Planning Attorney James F. Roberts
Naming the Trust as Beneficiary
The Primary beneficiary of your IRA should be your spouse, but after that you should name the trust as beneficiary. Remember if you name the children as the beneficiary they will have the options of distributions including a lump sum, 5 year, or lifetime distribution. Naming the trust beneficiary means you get to choose how it will be distributed because what happens it that the IRA is paid to the trust so that the sum can be distributed the way the trustee is instructed including the required minimum distributions and can be distributed over their lifetimes. You can set it up as an inherited IRA sub-trust to help control how the funds are distributed and used.
Follow up with your estate planning attorney to ensure that your estate plan honors your wishes and is set up correctly. Contact us today and set up an appointment.
We offer a many different resources and pamphlets on the subject of creating, updating and implementing estate plans. We also offer a regularly scheduled seminar in our office to help people determine what the best options are for them in their estate planning needs. We hope you sign up for one of our seminars to help you find your best options. We regularly conduct free seminars designed to teach about the benefits of creating an estate plan. The seminars are held on-site at our Anaheim office inside of our “classroom”. We offer light snacks and refreshments to the attendees and the group is often small and intimate, which allows for questions to be asked comfortably and for a very relaxed environment. Please encourage your loved ones to attend the seminar so that they may learn more about the estate planning process and benefits.