Life Insurance Lawyers

Yes.  Divorce and remarriage often leave current and former spouses without the death benefit they expected.  If your husband or wife’s ex-spouse is trying to claim his or her death benefit, a life insurance lawyer can help you fight to recover your rightful share of your husband or wife’s insurance policy.

Insurance companies will try to get out of paying claims whenever they can, and they won’t make it easy to claim a policy that has lapsed.  However, it may still be possible. Some policies have clauses that waive premiums if a person becomes disabled. Other times, premiums missed in the last few months of life because of severe illness can be excused by a grace period, especially of the policyholder was a long-time client of the insurer.  While nothing can be guaranteed when dealing with insurance companies, a life insurance lawyer can fight to recover benefits even if premium payments were missed and a policy lapsed.

Possibly.  The policyholder is well within their rights to change beneficiaries at will so long as they are alive, of sound mind, and not under duress.  The only exceptions are those designated irrevocable beneficiaries. This status is often granted to children and spouses, and neither divorce nor estrangement changes this status.  An irrevocable beneficiary must consent to any changes to the policy that affect their benefits, and depending on the policy terms, any changes to the policy at all.

If you were named as an irrevocable beneficiary but the insurance company says you were removed from the policy, this change can almost certainly be contested.

In many cases, last minute changes are made without the policyholder’s knowledge. Fraud in the form of last-minute beneficiary changes often happens to senior citizens suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia, who are tricked into signing papers they couldn’t possibly understand to name a distant relative or a caretaker as a primary beneficiary.  Such fraudulent changes can be contested.

Generally, only the policyholder can change or designate beneficiaries.  Some power of attorney documents allow agents of the policyholder to make such decisions, but doing so would bring sharp scrutiny to the agent if their decision is challenged by a former beneficiary or representative of the estate.

Unfortunately, there is no single database of life insurance policies and many older policies are no longer retained by insurance companies or buried in decades-old paper files.  If you expect your spouse or relative carried a life insurance policy but nobody knows the details, the best place to start are their financial records and mail. There will generally be annual or monthly payments notices, bank statement and other documents related to the policy which may indicate where the policy was taken out, and other identifying information.  You can also check with the Unclaimed Property office in your state. After a period of time, if no beneficiary can be found and the deceased had no will or estate plan, their death benefit will be sent to the agency in your state that handles unclaimed property, and if you can prove your relationship you may be able to claim the benefit with the help of a life insurance lawyer.

To find out if a life insurance policy was paid out, you will need contact information for the insurance company and the personal identifying information about the deceased.  However, insurance companies generally do not provide that information to non-beneficiaries. If you believe you are owed all or a portion of the death benefits, you should contact a life insurance lawyer to assist you in obtaining additional information.

Additionally, the agent who assisted in obtaining the policy can confirm if the policy has been collected yet.  If the answer is yes, but you are a beneficiary and have received no payment, you should contact a life insurance lawyer immediately.  While it’s possible that the policyholder simply changed their beneficiary without telling you, fraud and coercion are also common reasons for unexpected changes to a policy’s beneficiaries.

Most life insurance policies list a beneficiary, but there are several ways a policy could have no beneficiary at the time of the policyholder’s passing.  In some cases, the policyholder simply outlives their sole beneficiary. This often happens with widows who never updated their own policy after their spouse died.  Adult children of the deceased are often surprised to find their parent’s policy lists no beneficiary or lists a dead person as the sole beneficiary. What happens next depends on the policy and state law.  Sometimes either the state law governing the policy or the policy itself will establish an order of succession, starting with the spouse or children of the policyholder. Other policies will send the benefit to the policyholder’s estate.  In either case, a life insurance lawyer can help you make a claim if your loved one’s policy lists no beneficiary.

Life insurance money can either be split per capita or per stirpes.  If a policyholder has named his beneficiaries to split the proceeds per capita, they each receive a percentage share.  A common form of this arrangement would see a wife paid 50% and her adult children each paid 25% of their father’s death benefit.  Awarding beneficiaries per stirpes means benefits are paid out equally to each family branch and its descendants from the percentage allotted the named beneficiary, while per capita means the children of the named beneficiary receive nothing if he or she dies before the policy is claimed, and the other beneficiaries split his or her share.

More often, however, the beneficiary designation form on file with the insurance company will indicate exactly how the money will be disbursed and to whom.

No.  Only the policyholder (and in limited cases their power of attorney) can designate or change the designation of beneficiaries, and they must be alive to do so.  If someone comes forward with paperwork showing a beneficiary designation was changed after the date listed on the policyholder has already passed, you should retain a life insurance lawyer to represent you, as this individual is likely trying to defraud you.

Sometimes, a parent or grandparent will choose to leave their full insurance benefit to just one of their children.  It could be a matter of trust, but more often they took out life insurance after the birth of their first child and never updated the policy.  If, say, a brother was the sole beneficiary but wanted to split his father’s death benefit with his two younger sisters, he could not designate them as beneficiaries; only the policyholder can do that.  However, nothing would stop him from giving a share of his death benefit as a gift to his siblings. A downside to doing this is the possibility that the gift to your siblings will create tax liabilities.  With the recent doubling of estate exemptions to $11.4 million for 2019, a federal tax bill is unlikely, but many states may assess a tax on the money as a gift or inheritance. You should consult a financial planning professional for advice if you plan to share your life insurance benefit.

Where a minor is named as the beneficiary of a policy, the court will likely appoint someone to act as custodian of the child’s inheritance until they turn 18.  However, even if you anticipate this issue and name a custodian, there is little to prevent this individual from using the money as they see fit, either lavishing the child and squandering their inheritance or refusing to dip into the funds for anything but absolute necessities.  Few parents would wish for either scenario to come to pass. The best way to make a minor your beneficiary is to create a trust and name the child as the beneficiary of the trust. While this permits you much greater control of how your death benefit is spent for your child’s benefit, it creates a complicated tax situation and an estate planning attorney should be consulted as well.