Life insurance policies require you to choose a beneficiary, which is the person who will be the recipient of your policy’s benefits at the time of payout. Many policies also ask you to choose a ...

Making sure you know who gets your nest egg after your death is important. Source: 401(k) 2012 via Flickr. Estate planning is an important part of ensuring that your assets go where you want them to ...

An important part of estate planning is deciding who will get your assets when you pass away. This means naming primary and contingent beneficiaries on important accounts such as your life insurance ...

A contingent beneficiary can help ensure that your assets, trusts and insurance payouts go to the parties you want them to go to. What is a contingent beneficiary? Whether setting up a financial ...

Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. David Kindness is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and an expert in the fields of ...

A secondary beneficiary, also called a contingent beneficiary, is a person or entity entitled to get a distribution of assets from an estate or trust after the estate owner’s death if the primary ...

You need more than a primary beneficiary on your financial accounts... just in case. Contingency beneficiaries can be your Plan B and even Plan C. What is a contingent beneficiary? If that question ...

When purchasing life insurance, the choice of who to name as beneficiary is one of the most important decisions a person makes. A beneficiary is the person who receives the death benefit. The owner of ...

One of the most crucial pieces of estate planning is designating the beneficiaries for trusts, life insurance and other accounts that would be passed along at the time of death. For most people, ...

You might not be able to spend all the money in your 401(k) plan before you die. If that happens, your retirement savings will pass to the person you name as the beneficiary of the account. The ...