There are a number of reasons why a person might purchase a life insurance policy on herself. Often, the death benefit is to be used to pay for funeral expenses and other bills that the person still owed when she died. Another person should be named as the beneficiary if the policy purchased for this purpose. This person would be given responsibility for making these payments. However, life does not always go as planned.
When there is a named beneficiary, a life insurance policy is payable without having to go through the administration of an estate. When the company that issued it receives the necessary documentation, the money would be paid to this beneficiary, and, if used as planned, everything goes smoothly. Of course, the best laid plans of a deceased individual may go astray if events prior to her death do not follow the expected plan.
Often, the policy’s beneficiary is a child of the owner of the policy. This generally would mean the odds that the intended person will receive the proceeds. As long as the beneficiary uses the proceeds as the deceased parent requested, the plan will be a success. Then again, the odds may be in favor of this happening, but life does not promise, let alone guarantee, that something won’t go against the odds.
An elderly parent generally will outlive an adult child. When the adult child is the named beneficiary of the older parent’s life insurance policy, there could be a major problem if the child ends up dying first. Other variables of life may wreak havoc on what was expected. This example is based on a situation that occurred and is not all that rare. The other parent already had died. There were two adult sons, although only one was a beneficiary on the policy. He also had three children. When he died before his mother, her straightforward idea began to get complex and unworkable.
The Importance of Contingent Beneficiaries
After the son died, the policy’s contingent beneficiaries would be the crucial parties if the plan is to be implemented. A contingent beneficiary replaces a beneficiary who is unable to perform in this capacity. Sometimes, there is no contingent beneficiary, which will lead to potentially unintended consequences. The first problem is that the benefits remain to be paid. If no one was named to receive them under the new circumstances, the death benefits are paid by default to the decedent’s estate.
Since no Will existed, after the estate was opened and the policy was found by the estate’s personal representative who did then does what the insurer requires to prove that the named beneficiary could receive the death benefits while he (the other son) had the right to collect the asset on the estate’s behalf, the money ultimately would be paid to the parent’s estate. Being that she lived and died in Pennsylvania, the death benefits now must pass according to the intestacy laws of Pennsylvania – this result diverged considerably from what was intended.
Because the proceeds passed through the estate, any distribution and use would be delayed and may not follow the original plan that had seemed so carefully constructed. This could have been avoided, in part, by naming a contingent beneficiary in case the first beneficiary could not receive the death benefits. This was not done when the policy was purchased, and the mother did not update her beneficiaries after the son chosen to get them had died. Either way would have avoided payment to the estate. Also, if either path was taken, the likelihood that the policy’s benefits would be used as planned would have been better than the intestate distribution could promise since the parent had not discussed how the proceeds were to be used with anyone other than the original beneficiary.
Taxation always is concern and often is a reason that people pursue so-called nonprobate methods to distribute property. Life insurance proceeds that are paid to the beneficiary named in the policy have not been subject to Pennsylvania inheritance tax. However, after December 13, 1982, even when a policy’s proceeds are paid to the estate instead of a beneficiary, no inheritance tax is assessed. 72 P.S. § 9111(d). With this not being an issue, the question of what happens to the insurance proceeds that now were part of the estate is the main one in need of an answer.
The life insurance benefits now are another asset of the mother’s estate. The beneficiary designation is of no consequence because the one brother who was named already is dead. Since the mother had no Will at her death, Pennsylvania’s intestacy laws will determine what happens to the benefits after the insurance company has paid them to her estate.
Who Inherits if There is No Beneficiary?
The law is found in Title 20 of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes in Chapter 21, “Intestate Succession.” Sections 2103 and 2104 provide the answers. The first section applies to an estate, such as this one, in which there is no surviving spouse. It provides the order in which property will pass based on the relationship to the person who has died. The mother’s issue are at the top of the list in intestacy so all the insurance proceeds will be distributed to those who meet the definition of issue. The surviving son qualifies here, but you have to look at the next section (“Rules of succession”) to determine his son as well as the shares for anyone else.
“Issue” includes siblings and, when applicable, their descendants. This is applicable in the current case. The brothers would have been in the same degree of consanguinity because they directly descended from the same ancestor – their mother. However, with only one son surviving, the number of equal shares is defined at this level of survivorship since he is the closest surviving relative. Since there were two sons, this means that there will be two equal shares. The surviving son will receive half of the benefits from the life insurance policy now. It is worth noting that this section contains a survivorship clause – anyone who would inherit under Pennsylvania’s laws of intestate succession must outlive the decedent by five days. He did, so this becomes a meaningless footnote here.
There still is the second one-half share of the insurance proceeds to be distributed. The statute dictates that this share passes by representation to the three children of the deceased brother, which gives each an equal share of one third of what their father would have received under the laws of intestacy. In the end, by not naming a contingent beneficiary in the life insurance policy, the mother altered her intended plan to a considerable extent. Instead of one person receiving all of the proceeds from the policy, her estate will distribute half of the benefits to her surviving son and a one-sixth share to each of the surviving children of the deceased son, who was supposed to receive all of the proceeds when the life insurance policy was purchased by the mother.
This situation provides a good lesson regarding any estate planning. When circumstances change, your plan may not represent your intentions. If the resulting change to your estate plan is significant, then you need to revise that plan as soon as you can because you’ll never know when it had to be implemented.