topher06 said:
OldArmyCT said:
All I can tell you is the county told me the only way they were taking my deceased wife's name off the deed was after full probate. There are a lot of estate rules most people do not know:
-Powers of Attorney are no longer valid once the grantor dies.
-If you own an IRA and go comatose and your relatives need that money to care for you (or even do your RMD) the custodian will likely not give you any money, even if you walk in with a PoA. Merrill requires retirement account PoA's be annotated in the plating before they will recognize them.
-Put Transfers on Death on every account you can, they will bypass probate and get the money wherever it needs to go as soon as a Death Certificate is produced.
-The best way to distribute an IRA after death its to (1) Distribute the RMD. (2) Open an IRA account with the current firm for each beneficiary. (3) divide the IRA equally amongst the beneficiaries. (4) Beneficiaries can then choose to either keep the IRA, transfer the IRA, sell the investments and take the money. Keeps stuff clean so the IRS isn't after the beneficiaries. As an FA I had a lawyer beneficiary tell me he was a lawyer and he wasn't about to open an IRA with Merrill no matter what we said. "Do you understand I am a lawyer and can sue you?" "Do you know how many lawyers work for Merrill Lynch?" It took him a year to get his money and then it went into his new Merrill IRA.
Think this one isn't a probate rule, its just a banks covering their ass and not giving one **** about the consequences rule (and Merrill seems to be one of the absolute worst of them).
Maybe, maybe not. How hard is it to fake a PoA and worm ones way into dad's money? Lots of relatives pop up when someone is sick. Merrill has an in-house PoA clients can put in place for free, they just have to do it while the client is lucid. No need to pay for an attorney. The biggest Merrill rule clients object to is with inherited IRA's, non spousal. If mom is the last owner of an IRA and she dies with 3 beneficiaries, Merrill first distributes the RMD which pisses off the clients, then they open an IRA for each client and move the assets IAW deceased client instructions. New clients then have a new Merrill IRA which they never wanted, but they then can do whatever they want with it, including transfer to another firm. It's clean, it makes the IRS happy and it prevents new clients from suing Merrill for running into tax problems they claim they didn't know about.
True story: I was an FA for a long time, the maddest I ever had a person get with me was over transferring the account of a deceased person. The beneficiary got mad when I told him her PoA was no longer valid because she was dead. He was an estate attorney and tried to tell me I was wrong. He also complained, loudly, about having to wait 3 days for trades to settle, he asked me "Where did that rule come from?" Then he filed a formal complaint because I bought some "strange stocks" in her account, he never asked me about the stocks, just filed a formal complaint. Her husband died and we moved his stocks, which he had held for years, into her account and parked them there, he thought I had bought them for her. When his attorney called to ask me about those stocks I told him he may want to charge his guy full boat because he was seriously dumb.
