Protect, Preserve and Defend Your Health

We protect ourselves from costs associated with car accidents, flood and fire damage to our homes, and we have individual healthcare coverage to help prevent serious illness. Many of us have life insurance to plan for the future and to provide tax-free benefits to our families when we are gone. However, sometimes traditional coverage is just not enough. As we evolve as a society, so do our financial, retirement and health planning tools. There is a new solution now available so individuals can combine the best of both worlds – it's a hybrid solution to help ensure that long-term care needs will be satisfied while providing a legacy for heirs.

Beneficiary

Owner

Spouse

Survivors

Even though an IRA is frequently the largest asset people have, except perhaps their home, many IRA owners surprisingly fail to conduct a BOSS review on an annual basis to ensure that their money will flow the way they want it to. Many people are unaware that unless their IRAs and other retirement plans are set up correctly, they will be leaving their heirs a tax bill and not a legacy. Nobody is immune to IRA mistakes.

Plenty of well educated, intelligent, wealthy individuals die without proper planning because they just didn’t know they had a serious problem…a problem that, sadly, could have been easily corrected.

It’s important to understand what happens to your IRA when you pass away. Many people think that their IRA passes through their will, it does not. The IRA beneficiary designation form determines what happens to IRA assets. IRAs are not inherently probate assets, meaning, they do not need to go through the probate system which requires that a probate court declare how and to whom the assets shall be distributed. IRA assets COULD, however, end up going through the probate court system if there is no valid designated beneficiary and, as a default, the IRA ends up going into the deceased’s estate.

You may ask yourself, why does it matter if my IRA or 401(k) goes to my estate, my children are the beneficiaries of my estate anyway, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is that if the estate is the beneficiary of an IRA, the opportunity for heirs to stretch the IRA RMDs over their individual life expectancies is effectively destroyed. The opportunity for heirs to enjoy continued tax deferred growth on those IRA funds will be destroyed. The opportunity for heirs to maximize the benefit of the IRA by turning the tax infested IRA into a tax efficient legacy from you is destroyed!