Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Death benefit nominations – read the deed

Read the deed.
Following on from recent posts concerning superannuation death benefit payments, I was reminded this week of the absolute importance of reading the superannuation trust deed before making any death benefit payment.

It is becoming more and more regular to see many people, as part of their overall estate plan, embedding their required superannuation distribution provisions into the superannuation trust deed. Where this is done, the fact that there might be other nominations, or even provisions in a person’s will, not be of any effect – rather the terms of the deed must be followed.

In a future post, I will touch on a related issue concerning binding nominations that are entrenched in superannuation trust deeds.

Until next week.