A man opens a retirement account decades ago and names his wife as beneficiary. She passes away years before he does. He never updates the form. No contingent beneficiary. Just her name, still sitting there on an account he probably forgot even existed.
He remarries. He writes a new will. He tells his second wife and his kids exactly what to expect. Everyone assumes it’s handled.
It wasn’t.
When he died, the plan administrator pulled up the beneficiary form and found a named beneficiary who was already gone — and no one named to take her place. That account, which was specifically designed to skip probate and transfer directly to whoever he named, fell back into his estate instead.
The exact outcome a beneficiary designation exists to prevent.
From there, the account went through probate along with everything else. Distributed according to his will, eventually, to his second wife and his kids — just as he intended. But”eventually” meant probate court. Probate delays. Probate costs. On an asset that should have transferred in days, not months.
I was a law clerk in the largest probate court in Ohio before I opened my own practice. I saw this exact situation more than once — an account built specifically to avoid probate, pulled right back into it because one form got overlooked.
That’s not a story about who got what. It’s a story about how much can ride on a single piece of paper nobody thought to look at again.
If your spouse, your parent, or your sibling is listed as a beneficiary on any account or policy you own — and they’ve passed away — that designation needs to be updated now. Not when you get around to revisiting your will. Now.
And while you’re at it: if you don’t have a contingent beneficiary named on every account, name one. The primary is who gets it if everything goes as planned. The contingent is who gets it when it doesn’t.
