It’s in your best interests to make sure that you reconfigure your will every time you adjust your life insurance policy, and vice versa. By ensuring that these two documents do not conflict in any way, you can save your loved ones a lot of trouble in arranging your affairs and dividing your finances in the future.
When you get a policy through Luebbering Insurance Agency, LLC or anyone else in Columbia or Jefferson City, MO for that matter, the hierarchy of will vs. insurance policy will vary from one scenario to the next.
When it comes to the actual payout from the life insurance policy, the policy itself will determine who gets the money. Whatever it says in the will may not be followed if the life policy says that your ex-spouse takes the bulk of the payout, even if the will suggests otherwise.
Note that the insurance policy is straightforward in its language. If it names John Doe Jr. as the beneficiary, John Doe Jr. collects the money. A will can be a little more ambiguous. If it says "To my brother," how many brothers do you have? Did your father have any illegitimate children? A will should be written as clearly as possible, and even then, the will is not as legally binding or as precise as an insurance policy, it is only a list of goals. Once an executor, a family attorney, and the IRS have taken their cut of the inheritance, John Doe Jr. might collect nothing but a bill for the lawyer’s time.
Generally speaking, if you want to make sure that your family gets what they have coming to them, you should put that in writing in the policy when talking to Luebbering Insurance Agency, LLC located in Jefferson City, MO. The will can be contested, it can be misinterpreted, but the insurance policy will always send the money, possibly tax-free, to whoever is named in the document.
