I’m in a reverse situation now. My daughter asked me yesterday to take my name off her account, the account I opened when she was 2 years old. No problem, but I’m taking her name off as beneficiary on my accounts too. She wants to be on her own, so she will be. I told her she then needs to name a POD beneficiary, but I know she won’t. If she dies, the money will escheat to the state, and under state law it will all come back to me anyway as surviving parent (no spouse or children).
I don’t get it. Having her as beneficiary to your account doesn’t give her visibility into every dollar you spend, and does not give her the ability to clean out your account, and does not expose your account to her creditors or to her carelessness. Why would you remove her as beneficiary just because she wants to manage her own money without you seeing all the details? Did I miss something?
And to add to the above, if she died first, without having you as POD on her accounts, the money does not escheat to the state. It would go to you through intestate law and you would have to go through a potentially unnecessary probate.
@MomofJandL - Gosh. Sorry for your situation with your inlaws. That would have been especially rough regarding quality of care. It’s one thing to complain about the costs of travel or dining out or sprucing up one’s home, but it’s quite another to go cheap on care. I’d like to hope that such mindsets of fil’s patriarchal ilk regarding household finances being a “blue job,” are generational and literally dying off.
Dh and I created a trust awhile back and have updated it as the kids got older and are now adults. They know we have a trust, that they were able to attend college debt free and that we are “comfortable” and are very unlikely to ever need financial help from them. Beyond that, they don’t know specifics.
While we haven’t actually done it yet, dh and I plan to create a drop box to which will hold a copy of our trust and any other details the kids may need and then share it with them. Seems to make much more sense to us than just keeping a hard copy of our trust in a locked filing cabinet along with all our account info, passwords etc., particularly since none of our kids live near us.
She just doesn’t want me to be involved in her finances and doesn’t want anything from me, so I removed her as a beneficiary. It’s what she wants.
If there is no POD, and no claim through probate, the bank will escheat the money to the state. It happens here all the time. There would be no other claims to it superior to a parent. I agree this way is more difficult but par for the course for this kid who will always take the hard way over an easier path.
Her sister is totally fine with the way things are so she’ll remain listed as the beneficiary.
There’s not a huge amount in any of these accounts.
@twoinanddone - our ds also had a bank account that we opened when he was a young child. Dh and ds were both on the account, and it contained money ds had earned, saved, or been gifted through the years. We used it as a means to contribute the amount of spending money we had determined we wanted to give him each month that he was in college. It was set up as an automatic transfer from our joint account to ds’s account. It was nice because we could see how much he was spending, what the balance was, etc. However, prior to his last semester of his senior year, we were moving to to a different state, so we gave him a lump sum of the remaining five-six months of spending money, and he closed that account and opened another that was solely in his name in the state where he was going to be employed.
IMO, our adult children do reach an age when we should no longer be involved with their finances. Those become personal to them, just as our finances are personal to us. Wanting to be financially on their own is kind of the goal, isn’t it? I may be missing something, and I certainly don’t know your personal situation, but her wanting you off her account seems different from not having a POD. I agree it would be better if she recognized the need to have a POD set up (it doesn’t have to name you as the beneficiary), but, again, that is her decision to make - whether it’s a good one or not. But, perhaps this is all part of larger issues that extend beyond money. It sounds like sister is still the POD on your account when it used to be the both of them.
Ds graduated a year ago, and I have no clue about any of his finances anymore. I had a general idea of what his starting salary was, but I didn’t know exactly.
I told my kids that until they marry, I am to be the beneficiary of their life insurance, retirement accounts and any death benefits at work. H is mine, with the kids as contingents at 20% each. If, heaven forfend, any of my kids with such accounts (right now, just 2) was to die, I would divide the proceeds amongst the siblings equally.
When my aunt and my mom started getting household assistance, I removed all checkbooks, debit and credit cards, etc. from the house and transferred their mail to my home. I decided that removing temptation is probably the safest path. I knew I was correct when SIL walked into the spare bedroom at her mom’s house and caught a new aide going through the dresser drawers. She claimed she was looking for diapers, but those were in a box next to the door. Needless to say, that aide was fired immediately and the agency notified.
She requested I get off her accounts and I did. I opened the accounts for my kids at my credit union when they were babies. Not a big deal, but she didn’t like that it was still a joint account. I have NEVER said anything about her spending money at the mall or online, and I rarely checked their accounts for spending, just for things like if the IRS got paid/made a deposit, or if the school made a refund. For my other daughter, I get fraud calls (her card gets hacked a lot because she uses a,s a debit card all the time) and it works for us as a double check for me to remain on her account. Of course they can open accounts at other banks if they want; we all just like this credit union which I have used for 40 years and them 20+.
She has no problem using my AmazonPrime account and my knowing that she’s buying fishing poles or popcorn for her boyfriend or other weird stuff. She’s too cheap to pay for her own account.
She wants to be independent, on her own, and wants nothing from me (except to use my Prime account), so that’s how it’s set up now. But it’s tough out there, and I don’t think she knows that.
We sat down with our kids last month (26 and 28) and gave them details of our finances and access to a spreadsheet stating where the money is, specific amounts, and contact numbers. I’m looking for a secure location for account numbers.
When my kid graduated from college, we closed the custodian account and open her own account. We will let her know about our finances when she graduates from grad school.
I get that Twoin, it is just the idea that one daughter is a beneficiary (which to me only means the account would go to her if you died) and the other is not seems to set up the potential for future trouble between your girls. If this is only one account, that is one thing. But if all of the money would go to one daughter and not the other, that does seem harsh. Of course your money, your decision.
I have a friend who still has her 26 yo kids bank accounts linked to hers in some way. She can see what they spend and what they save. IMHO that is pretty intrusive on adults that are fully independent.
@twoinanddone We didn’t have POD accounts, but we did have joint accounts with the kids opened when they started highschool so they had a debit card (different from their little savings accounts for random gift money opened when they were born). Both were set up for the auto transfers all through college and it was very handy to have the link to push extra money for the quarter abroad. Just a few days after DS graduated college, he said he should get rid of the high school account and we went together and closed it and he opened a new one. I actually think it was still labeled “for students” and he felt he shouldn’t have it, but it could have been a privacy issue as well since he is very private. On the other hand DD is still on that joint account (but auto transfers stopped long long ago… )of course she WAS still a student until last month; grad school took a long time. We’ve never said anything at all about spending either in high school (other than the general advice to watch for fraud, overdraught costs and blah blah blah) or later. Just different strokes for different folks. Both kids are very careful with their money, but DS keeps much better track of his and has investments (of course he also has a salary). DD leaves her money not working for her way too much and drives her dad crazy. I hear you on the kids being different and one generally taking a harder road if it is available.
So not only families do different things, kids IN the same family do different things. I don’t see anything dire about either situation!
As far as shared accounts, both kids have been authorized users on one of our credit cards since age 17 or 18. They used it for groceries, medical and dental appointments, textbooks. They asked our permission before buying a t-shirt or word processing software.
We had one shared bank account with only one of our kids. Husband qualified and was able to assign his post-9/11 GI Bill benefit to DS2. (DS1 had graduated by the time DH was eligible.) Money was going for tuition etc., so son first said to have it deposited in one of our accounts since we took care of the payments. The government, rightly, requires that the payee be named on the receiving account, so son said joint account. We ended up with DS2 as recipient, DH since the benefit flowed from him and he could pursue any problems should they crop up, and me since I was the one with the login at school’s accounting office. It was a bigger risk for DS2 than for us; the money was/is his, after all, and there we were with unlimited access to it.
I just took myself off my 19 year old’s account that we opened jointly when she was 16. She’s extremely frugal. I’m not worried for her.
I will say that this thread has gotten me thinking that I hope she doesn’t share our financial details with anyone. We’ll have to have a chat when she’ comes home from her internship.
I recently had a similar chat with my two. My oldest had called asking for advise about a co-worker request - “just until paycheck day, for a family death in Mexico” [note that the next paycheck was scheduled to arrive in 2-3 days]. We had a conversation about not sharing private financial information or bonus income, without good reason. And suggested that she either consider us as her financial advisers, or hire her own. But that co-workers/friends were possibly not good options. I’ve been going through “finance 101” with her since freshman year, and we’re at a pretty good place with me offering suggestions and asking questions when she prompts, but, staying to the side otherwise. Not perfect, but we’re talking …
I have friends who were happy they were still on their college students accounts when things went wrong. For example, a kid studying abroad had a debit card stop working and wasn’t able to get any cell reception where he was. It was easy for mom to make the call to the bank and get it straightened out. That wouldn’t have been possible if she wasn’t on the account.
^Dh was on until near the end of college. I think there comes a point where the parent getting off the account needs to happen.
I’m still on S2’s, more for convenience than anything else. I don’t ever check his transactions and only go into the account to withdraw $ to pay for his phone bill (we’re on the same cell phone account). I realize there are other ways for him to pay for his phone bill now, but when we started charging him for his share of the bill there weren’t. He’s OK with our arrangement and trusts that I don’t review his spending.
Just heard a story on the radio yesterday saying that while we older folks do not share financial info with friends or co-workers, millennials have fewer qualms about sharing salary info. I have some very dear friends. I know a lot about their lives, but not about their specific financial information (except what I can discern from their life style).