What Happens to My Stocks and Bonds When I Die?

What happens to your stocks and bonds after your death depends on the provisions you’ve established. If there’s a joint owner of your investment assets, the stocks and bonds will immediately become solely their assets when you pass away. This is also true for real property and other assets with joint owners.

Having a joint owner isn’t the only option that allows for a relatively seamless transfer of assets, but it’s one of the more common forms of asset transference, especially for married couples. If there’s no joint owner or named beneficiary, and the assets aren’t held in a trust, it’s possible for your investment assets to be mired in inconvenient and potentially costly probate processes.

If you don’t have a joint owner of your investments or a trust, you may want to look into naming transfer-on-death beneficiaries.

How to Ensure Your Investment and Retirement Savings Go Where You Want

There’s never a bad time to check your beneficiaries and provisions. If you haven’t checked the beneficiaries on your insurance policies, annuities or savings accounts recently, now is probably a great time to update them. People’s lives and needs change, and the beneficiaries you listed 10 or 20 years ago may no longer be appropriate.

The Nonprobate Transfers on Death Act

Arizona uses the Uniform Nonprobate Transfers of Death Act to allow the automatic transfer of assets to descendants at the time of a person’s death, if they’ve designated a transfer-on-death (TOD) beneficiary. You can name multiple TOD beneficiaries and specify how you want your assets divided among those beneficiaries.

The stocks and bonds don’t need to be liquidated so the proceeds can be disbursed, and your beneficiaries won’t be required to go through probate to gain access to the assets. Your estate’s executor shouldn’t need to take any actions to make the transfer.

The new holder/s of the stocks or bonds may need to complete some additional steps to formally claim these new assets, like providing ID, an official death certificate and re-registering the holdings in their own name.

Stocks and Bonds in a Trust

Stocks and bonds are only some of the assets that can be held in a trust. Nearly anything of value can technically be owned by a trust, from liquid cash and real estate to collectables and precious metals. There are also ways to manage stocks and bonds that reside in a trust.

A trustee can open a brokerage account at a financial institution in the name of the trust. Then the trustee can personally manage the funds in the trust’s brokerage account, or they can hire someone else to do it.

Although there are very specific rules pertaining to who gets money from the trust and when, it is one of the easiest and safest ways to ensure stocks and bonds are transferred to the people you intend after your passing.

Just because you created a trust for your assets doesn’t mean you have to manage the funds in it. You can hire professional brokerage firms or retirement investment experts and fiduciaries, like those at Fullerton Financial Planning, to protect and grow your trust’s assets for your family.

The Process Without a Trust, Will or Transfer-on-Death Beneficiary

If there’s no mechanism to automatically transfer holdings to a descendant or beneficiary, then surviving family members will need to go through the probate process to declare ownership over investment assets. A probate court will ultimately decide who gets which assets – in this case the stocks and bonds.

Why Should You Trust Fullerton Financial Planning with Your Retirement Planning?

Our goal at Fullerton Financial Planning is to help our clients arrive at and sustain a worry-free retirement. You’ve worked hard all your life – you should get to enjoy your future without needing to worry about finances or micromanaging your retirement savings.

We develop retirement plans that preserve your assets and allow them to grow. Every client of Fullerton Financial Planning can trust their retirement savings will be managed by fiduciaries who are ethically bound to always put your interests ahead of our own.

In addition to managing retirement assets for our clients, we can also assist with estate planning solutions like trusts. We would be happy to discuss ways in which we can help protect your assets from things like high long-term or assisted living costs while also enabling you to leave money for your children and grandchildren.



Give us a call at (623) 974-0300 to speak with a financial advisor today.