Planned

:speech_balloon:

Transfer of Assets upon death

When one spouse in a couple passes away, its likely that the surviving spouse inherits all assets and becomes a single filer instead of joint. I’ve modeled this as a milestone with a tax consequence, but that doesn’t really work because assets may still be owned by the deceased spouse on PL doesn’t really “know” that the person is deceased so it continues to compute their taxes. Putting them all in the name of the spouse expected to live longer also doesn’t work for traditional IRA’s because it messes up the RMD start date. I think it might be nice for life expectancy to be handled as an “About You” input, which creates a sort of “automatic milestone” with automatic tax consequences. PL should understand the concept of death.

17 votes

Tagged as Suggestion

Suggested 28 February 2023 by user Chris Miller

Moved into Planned 15 October 2023

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  • 28 February 2023 Chris Miller suggested this task

  • 28 February 2023 Kyle Nolan approved this task

  • avatar
    Diane Eagle

    Critical functionality for accurate assessment of plan’s change of success.

    16 April 2023
  • avatar
    Steve Wood

    This is a fundamental need and arguably the biggest weakness of PL. Lots of changes occur on death of one partner–end of medicare premiums, reduction of social security, change in expenses, change in tax brackets and standard deduction, and transfer of accounts. Aside from xfer of accts, these can all be modeled with various hacks, but it’s kludgy and hard to maintain. Also it should be simple to model the death of either partner regardless of expectations.

    21 April 2023
  • avatar
    Tom Gifford

    I agree with Steve Wood. This is a PL significant omission with no real work around because so many items are impacted (which Steve nicely called out).

    One thought for Kyle - as you implement this feature, you might consider supporting divorce as part of the same effort. With death the assets can be transferred to the remaining spouse, with divorce the assets can be deleted if they are owned by the spouse who is leaving the projection. I think most of the other items like taxes will be the same with death or divorce. Just a thought… While supporting divorce is not a high priority to me, the work seems so similar that it might a minimal add-on when adding support for death.

    07 August 2023
  • avatar
    AB BA
    Tom Gifford: I agree with Steve …

    Yes. Yes. Yes.

    07 September 2023

  • 15 October 2023 Kyle Nolan moved this task into Planned

  • avatar
    Amber

    Critically important - especially when one spouse is the breadwinner.

    02 December 2023