Life insurance and your estate plan

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi this is Robert Mansour. I wanted to talk briefly about how life insurance can help with your estate plan. Sometimes I get clients who are younger or even clients who are not so young, and maybe they don't have a lot in their estate. Maybe they don't have a lot of money or a lot of savings, etc. One of the ways that you can infuse a lot of cash into your estate is if you have an adequate life insurance policy. It doesn't have to be anything complicated. A regular term life insurance policy is fine. I have one of those myself for my family.

Basically, when you pass away the life insurance company will write a check to your family or better yet to your living trust. That money can be used to help with educating the kids, to helping your spouse, paying off debts, mortgage, all of that. Very, very helpful. Think of it as income replacement in the event that you pass away. Life insurance is a very good tool for that.

If you have minor children, the best thing to do is to have that life insurance money payable to your living trust so that money can be protected for your children and used for appropriate reasons like health care, education, etc. If it is payable directly to your children, that could be a problem because the life insurance company is not going to write a check to the kids and you don't want the kids having full access to that money at age 18 when they're technically adults.

Life insurance is a very good tool to help infuse cash into an estate, especially when you don't have a lot of cash lying around, provides for your family, etc. You have to ask yourself, "How is that money going to flow into my estate and how is that going to be managed? When do my children get that money? Under what circumstances?" Thank you very much for watching this brief video. I hope you found it helpful.

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