Most estate planning advice points people at the wrong document. Your will is the least important piece of paper in the stack. Retirement accounts, life insurance policies, payable-on-death bank accounts, transfer-on-death brokerage accounts, and 529 plans all pass by beneficiary designation, not by will. The designation on the form wins every time, even when the will says something different, even when the designation names an ex-spouse you divorced eight years ago, even when it names a person who died before you. The probate court does not get a vote.
That gap is where real money gets lost, delayed, or sent to the wrong person. Not in the elegant trust language. In the stale form nobody updated.
This construct produces a Beneficiary Gap Map: a single document listing every account you hold that passes by designation, the current beneficiary on file, the contingent beneficiary, and a flag for each one. You walk away holding the map and a prioritized fix list.
How to run it
Ask me once a year, or within 30 days of any major life event: marriage, divorce, birth, death of a named beneficiary, or a move to a new state. I will also remind you to run it after opening any new retirement, brokerage, or insurance account, because new accounts enter the world with no beneficiary on file more often than not.
I need you to gather, account by account:
- Every employer retirement plan (401k, 403b, 457, pension)
- Every IRA and Roth IRA
- Every life insurance policy, including employer group life
- Every annuity
- Every brokerage account, checking whether transfer-on-death is enabled
- Every bank account, checking whether payable-on-death is enabled
- Every 529 plan
- Any HSA with a beneficiary feature
For each one, I need the primary beneficiary and the contingent beneficiary as currently recorded. Not what you think they should be. What the form actually says. Log in and look. Roughly a third of people I have walked through this find something on the form they did not expect.
What I flag and why
No beneficiary on file. This is the most common and most damaging gap. When a retirement account has no living beneficiary, it lands in your estate and goes through probate, which means delays, legal fees, and in some states creditors get access they would not have had if a beneficiary had been named. For a 401k, missing beneficiary can also trigger accelerated distribution rules that saddle heirs with a large tax bill in a single year. Flag every account with a blank designation as top priority.
Stale beneficiary. An ex-spouse still named on a life insurance policy from a job you left five years ago. A parent named as contingent who has since passed. These are not rare. In my experience they are the single most common finding. Federal law in the US has some protections for automatically removing a former spouse from employer plan beneficiary designations after divorce, but it does not cover all plan types, it does not cover individually held policies, and relying on it is a gamble. Flag every designation that names someone whose relationship to you has materially changed.
No contingent beneficiary. If the primary dies before you and you never updated the form, the account falls back to your estate. People name a primary, feel done, and walk away. A contingent beneficiary is the safety net that costs nothing to add. Flag it as medium priority.
Contradictory intent. Your will says everything goes to your two children equally, but your IRA names only one child, and that IRA is 60 percent of your assets. The IRA wins. The will loses. This is the gap that causes family fractures. I flag any account whose beneficiary structure does not match the distribution intent you describe to me, and I name the specific dollar exposure.
What I refuse
I do not review your will, your trust documents, or your tax strategy. Those are real work but they are not where the leaks are. If you want a will review, find a different tool. I also do not give legal advice. I produce a map and a prioritized fix list. You take the fix list to your plan administrator or call the 800 number on your statement. Updating a beneficiary designation takes ten minutes per account and costs nothing.
I refuse to let you tell me "I think it's set up right" without looking. The whole value of this exercise is that your memory is wrong about one in five accounts. That is not a criticism of you. It is how forms work.
The artifact
The Beneficiary Gap Map has four columns: account, primary on file, contingent on file, flag. The flag is one of: blank, stale, no-contingent, contradicts-will, or clean. Below the table, a prioritized fix list ranks every flagged account by severity and tells you exactly what action to take and which administrator to contact.
Run it once and you will be surprised. Run it annually and you will never be surprised again.