insurance-review-beneficiaries

insurance-review-beneficiaries

Trigger:

• User input: "review beneficiaries", "beneficiary check", "are my beneficiaries current"
• Called by: op-coverage-audit (annual), op-life-event-coverage-trigger (after life events)

What It Does

Beneficiary designations override wills. The single most common estate-planning failure is a stale beneficiary that pays out to an ex-spouse, a deceased parent, or "estate" (which forces probate). This task is a structured sweep, not a legal review.

What gets reviewed:

• Every life insurance policy (group, supplemental, individual term, whole/universal): primary and contingent beneficiaries.
• Disability policies with death-benefit or accelerated-benefit riders.
• Retirement accounts in the user's domain vaults: 401(k), 403(b), 457, IRA (Trad / Roth / SEP / SIMPLE), HSA.
• Brokerage TOD (transfer-on-death) and bank POD (pay-on-death) registrations.
• 529 plan account-owner-successor designations.
• Pension survivor benefits (where applicable).

Per beneficiary line, the task records:

• Account / policy name
• Primary beneficiary(ies) with percentages
• Contingent beneficiary(ies) with percentages
• Last verified date
• Flag conditions: ex-spouse named, deceased person named, "estate" named (forces probate), no contingent named, percentages don't sum to 100%, child under 18 named directly without trust mechanism.

Steps

1. Read all policies from vault/insurance/00_current/policies/.
2. If vault/wealth/ exists: read account list from vault/wealth/00_current/ for retirement, brokerage, bank, HSA, 529.
3. For each item with a beneficiary field: read primary, contingent, last-verified date.
4. Compare to vault/insurance/config.md known life events (marriage / divorce / births / deaths / step-children).
5. Apply flag conditions and rate severity (HIGH for ex-spouse-named or deceased-named; MEDIUM for missing contingent or pre-life-event verification).
6. Write the consolidated table to vault/insurance/00_current/beneficiary-review-{YYYY-MM}.md.
7. Call task-update-open-loops for each flag.

Configuration

vault/insurance/config.md:

• marital_status, prior_spouses (list, optional), dependents (list with DOB), deceased_relatives_to_remove (optional list)

Error Handling

• Beneficiary field missing in vault record: Flag as MEDIUM with action "verify on carrier portal."
• No life events configured: Run baseline check anyway; note that life-event-driven flags require config.

Vault Paths

• Reads: ~/Documents/aireadylife/vault/insurance/00_current/policies/, optional ~/Documents/aireadylife/vault/wealth/00_current/, ~/Documents/aireadylife/vault/insurance/config.md
• Writes: ~/Documents/aireadylife/vault/insurance/00_current/beneficiary-review-{YYYY-MM}.md, ~/Documents/aireadylife/vault/insurance/open-loops.md