THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FORUM (07/08/01)

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FORUM

Your beneficiaries: Who will get your money?

by Martha Lysko
UNA National Secretary

All estate planners and financial advisors agree that every prudent individual should periodically review his or her financial portfolio and make necessary changes. This means not only evaluating the performance of your portfolio but also updating personal information. Without correct information your wishes for proper distribution of your assets may not be carried out as you had planned.

Life insurance is bought to protect those we must provide for in case of our unexpected death, provide a burial fund for ourselves, and leave money to charitable institutions of our choice or other reasons. It is most often intended for someone else to receive. To ensure that the proceeds of a life insurance policy go to the person or persons intended, it is important to periodically update the beneficiary file on all your insurance policies. Whether they are individually owned and purchased or they are a part of an employer-sponsored group insurance, everyone should check, from time to time, the beneficiary listed on his policy.

Please review the beneficiaries on your UNA policies and make necessary changes to best reflect your current wishes. If you have named your parents as beneficiaries and they are no longer alive, you need to name someone else. If you named your children and they no longer live with you, please provide us with correct addresses. If the children changed their names, give us the new name and new addresses. If the beneficiary is divorced from you, consider if you want him/her to continue as your beneficiary. If you named an institution as your beneficiary, review to see that the institution still exists or find out who the successor is. This brief and very basic advice is given based on the experience at the UNA Home Office in the payment of claims.

Each year the UNA publishes a list of claims that it is unable to pay because we cannot find the beneficiary, the owner or the insured of a UNA policy. The reasons we cannot find these people were mentioned above. The beneficiary died, the member changed his address and never notified us, children married and moved away, parents died, etc. Often we find ourselves in an unpleasant situation because we are unable to pay the claim to who (or what) seems to be the rightful beneficiary only because the insured during his/her lifetime failed to make the necessary changes.

What happens to the money left in unpaid claims? The answer is quite simple: it reverts to the state. Each state has escheat laws that require financial institutions to hand over the property as early as two or three years if the rightful owner is not found. The length of time varies from state to state, but all have time limits. This year the UNA will be required to pay to the state of New Jersey and other states substantial amounts due to the fact that we have not located the rightful owners of unpaid claims.

To update your file, please complete the beneficiary form on this page or call the UNA Home Office at our toll free number 1-800-253-9862.

Young UNA'ers

David and Iryna Hrynyk, children of Halyna and Taras Hrynyk of Auburn, N.Y., are new members of UNA Branch 234, whose secretary is UNA Advisor Eugene Oscislawski. The children were enrolled by their parents as a birthday gift.

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