They had a beautiful plan. A trust, matching wills, everything drawn up by a good attorney and signed with confidence.
She never worried about money for a second. Then he died, and the largest single asset they owned, his rollover IRA, paid out to the woman he divorced in 1994.
Her name was still on the beneficiary form. It had never been changed, and the form beats the trust, every time.
There was nothing she could do. The custodian followed the designation. His current wife of twenty-six years received none of it, and the plan everyone trusted could not touch the one account that held half their net worth.
The documents were perfect. The forms behind them were a decade out of date, and no one had ever pulled them to check.
This is the exact gap a Plan Checkup exists to catch, and it is more common than almost anything else we see.