Getting your affairs in order, including your beneficiaries

Death and taxes, and disbursement of your "assets''. Putting our affairs in order.    None of us wants to face that unpleasant subject, at least I don't.  I do the obvious stuff, but do I do all the dotting of the i's?

My sister's ex husband died last month.  He had small cell lung cancer (or was it non small cell - the type that is very aggressive).  He was a larger than life man.  A man's man, big, expansive, powerful, funny.  Very likable in public but he had another private side - he was abusive to my sister who hung on to the marriage until he asked for a divorce so he could live with the woman he had been seeing for years.  My sister was shocked that he had someone, which shows how powerful a defense mechanism denial can be.

Then came the final reckoning...the will.  The deceased left his girlfriend a few hundred thousand. Then he left the grand kids his  investment account...to be in trust for them until they are 25.  His girlfriend is the executor of that trust, not his daughter, my niece.  My niece and her father had a strained relationship, mainly because of the way he had treated his wife, her mother.  However, he told her as he was dying that she was the beneficiary of his pension (the old fashioned pension that companies no longer offer) and she would get monthly benefits.  She was getting nothing else. Then came a package to my sister from her ex's former employer.  She was listed.as his beneficiary, not his daughter.  The listing of the beneficiary was done  at least 20 years ago when my sister and her ex were still married.  It was never changed, although apparently my sister's ex thought he had changed the beneficiary from his ex wife to his daughter.

My sister plans to turn over the payments to her daughter for whom they were intended.  However, the payments will only continue for as long as my sister is alive.  Her daughter will surely live longer and could have benefited from payments for a longer period of time .

The moral of this story is to tie up those loose ends and be sure everything is the way you want it when you die.