Regarding Minor Children and Life Insurance

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Hello again, everybody. This is Robert Mansour, broadcasting from my office in Los Angeles, where one of my areas of practice is estate planning. One of the issues that comes up oftentimes is when people have life insurance, they don't know who to make it payable to. Usually, they make it payable to a spouse, which is fine. And then, after the spouse, they name their minor children. Now, I'm not a big fan of naming minor children, and here is the reason why.

First of all, the life insurance company is not going to write a check to a minor and then, at age 18, I certainly don't want my kids having full access to the life insurance money. For me, I have a million-dollar life insurance policy, so I don't want half a million dollars to go to one of my kids and the other half to another kid. Frankly, that's just going to open up a lot of doors and make a lot of problems for them.

They may be subject to the influence of others. They may not handle that money well. I would much rather the money be guarded for them and protected for them, which is why I have my life insurance policy made payable to my living trust. The reason for that is I want the money to be protected for the kids. I want the money to be sitting there growing for them, distributed to them at an appropriate times for appropriate reasons.

I don't want that money going directly to the children, because they'll either squander it, somebody else will take advantage of them, who knows what? I would much rather it be payable to the Mansour Family Trust, which is my living trust. So, if you have a living trust or if you're considering creating a living trust.

I strongly recommend you consider making your life insurance payable to your living trust. It might be the appropriate thing to do. Thank you very much for watching this video and we'll catch you next time.