Estate Planning: What to Ask Your Financial Advisor

May 14, 2026

Estate planning is not just a legal exercise. The decisions your financial advisor makes — about account titling, beneficiary designations, and portfolio structure — can determine whether your estate plan actually works.

Most people think of estate planning as something their attorney handles. You meet with a lawyer, sign a will and a power of attorney, maybe establish a trust, and consider the matter settled. The financial advisor, in this view, is a separate relationship — someone who manages the investments while the attorney handles the legal documents.

That separation is a mistake. The legal documents your attorney drafts are only as effective as the financial structure they are designed to govern. Account titling, beneficiary designations, and the composition of your portfolio all interact with your estate plan in ways that can either reinforce your intentions or completely undermine them.

Your financial advisor should be an active participant in your estate planning — not as a legal advisor, but as someone who understands how the financial pieces connect to the legal ones.

Beneficiary Designations Override Your Will

This is the most important thing most people do not know about estate planning: a beneficiary designation on a retirement account or life insurance policy supersedes whatever your will says.

If your will leaves everything to your children equally, but your IRA still lists your ex-spouse as the primary beneficiary from a designation you set up 20 years ago, your ex-spouse receives the IRA. The will is irrelevant. The beneficiary designation controls.

This is not a hypothetical edge case. It is one of the most common estate planning failures, and it happens because beneficiary designations are set once and rarely reviewed. Life changes — marriages, divorces, deaths, births — but the paperwork often does not.

The question to ask your financial advisor: When did we last review the beneficiary designations on every account I hold with you? Are the primary and contingent beneficiaries current and intentional?

Account Titling Determines What Goes Through Probate

How an account is titled — individually, jointly, in a trust, with a transfer-on-death designation — determines whether it passes through probate or transfers directly to heirs. Assets that pass through probate are subject to court oversight, public record, potential creditor claims, and delays that can last months or years. Assets that transfer directly bypass all of that.

Retirement accounts with named beneficiaries transfer directly. Life insurance with named beneficiaries transfers directly. Accounts titled in a revocable living trust transfer according to the trust terms, outside of probate. Individually titled accounts with no beneficiary designation go through probate.

The question to ask your financial advisor: How are my accounts titled, and does that titling align with my estate plan? If I have a trust, have the appropriate accounts been retitled into the trust?

The Inherited IRA Rules Have Changed

The SECURE Act of 2019 and the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 significantly changed the rules for inherited IRAs. Under the old rules, a non-spouse beneficiary could stretch distributions from an inherited IRA over their lifetime, allowing decades of continued tax-deferred growth. Under the current rules, most non-spouse beneficiaries must fully distribute the inherited IRA within 10 years of the original owner's death.

For beneficiaries in their peak earning years, receiving a large IRA distribution within a 10-year window can result in substantial income tax — potentially at the highest marginal rates. A $500,000 IRA inherited by a 50-year-old professional who is already earning $200,000 per year creates a very different tax outcome than the same IRA inherited by a retired beneficiary in a lower bracket.

This changes the calculus around which assets to leave to which heirs. A Roth IRA, which also requires distribution within 10 years for most non-spouse beneficiaries, distributes income-tax-free. A traditional IRA distributes as ordinary income. Taxable brokerage accounts receive a stepped-up cost basis at death, meaning heirs can sell immediately with little or no capital gains tax.

The question to ask your financial advisor: Given the 10-year distribution rule, which of my accounts are most tax-efficient to leave to my heirs? Should we consider Roth conversions to reduce the future tax burden on inherited assets?

The Interaction Between Your Portfolio and Your Estate

The size and composition of your portfolio at death affects your estate in ways that go beyond the account balances. A large traditional IRA is an asset on paper, but it carries an embedded tax liability — every dollar distributed will be taxed as ordinary income. That tax liability is not reflected in the account balance, but it is real, and it reduces the effective value of the asset to your heirs.

A well-structured estate plan accounts for this. It considers not just the gross value of each asset, but the after-tax value to the intended recipient. It may involve strategic Roth conversions during your lifetime to shift the tax burden from your heirs to yourself — particularly if you are in a lower bracket now than your heirs will be when they receive the distributions.

It may also involve charitable giving strategies that allow you to donate appreciated assets — removing the embedded capital gains from your estate while supporting causes you care about — rather than donating cash and leaving the appreciated assets to heirs who will owe tax on the gains.

What Your Financial Advisor Should Know About Your Estate Plan

Your financial advisor does not need to be an estate planning attorney. But they should know the basic structure of your plan — whether you have a will, a trust, a power of attorney, and a healthcare directive. They should know who your intended heirs are and in what proportions. They should know whether you have charitable intentions. And they should be coordinating with your attorney and CPA when decisions in one domain affect the others.

The questions worth asking in your next review meeting: Have we reviewed all beneficiary designations in the past two years? Are my accounts titled consistently with my estate plan? Do you know whether I have a trust, and if so, which accounts should be retitled into it? Given the 10-year inherited IRA rule, are there Roth conversion opportunities we should be considering? If I have appreciated assets I intend to give to charity, are we handling that in the most tax-efficient way?

If your advisor cannot engage with these questions, or if the conversation has never come up, that is worth noting.

The Rulicent Approach

At Rulicent, we treat estate planning coordination as a standard part of the client relationship, not a specialty service. We are not attorneys and we do not draft legal documents. But we do review beneficiary designations regularly, we do consider account titling as part of portfolio construction, and we do think about the after-tax value of assets to your heirs — not just the pre-tax balance.

When our clients are working with an estate planning attorney, we participate in that process to ensure the financial structure supports the legal intent. When a client has not yet engaged an attorney, we can identify the gaps and help them understand what needs to be addressed.

If you would like to understand whether your current financial structure is aligned with your estate planning intentions, a Portfolio Evaluation is the right starting point. We will assess not just your investment strategy, but the broader financial picture — including how your accounts are structured and whether that structure serves your goals.