Here's a scenario I see more than any other in estate reviews: someone did the right thing and had a will drawn up years ago, naming their children equally. Then life happened — a remarriage, a new grandchild, an old 401(k) rolled into an IRA — and the will was never touched again because, as far as they knew, it was still handling everything.
It wasn't. Their IRA still named an ex-spouse from a marriage that ended a decade earlier. Their newer annuity had never been assigned a beneficiary at all. None of that showed up anywhere in the will, because none of it was ever going to be controlled by the will in the first place.
I'm Daniel Faiella, an independent insurance broker and estate advisor in Carson City. This is the conversation I have with Northern Nevada families more than any other, and it starts with one fact almost nobody is told clearly enough.
Your will doesn't control your biggest assets
A will governs your probate estate — property that doesn't already have a designated owner or beneficiary lined up. But most of the money people accumulate over a working life doesn't fall into that category. IRAs, 401(k)s and other workplace retirement plans, annuities, and life insurance policies all pass by contract, directly to whoever is named on the beneficiary form, the moment you die. The custodian or insurance company simply pays the named person — no probate court, no executor, and no reference to your will at all.
That's usually a feature, not a bug: it's faster, more private, and cheaper than probate. The problem is that most people assume their will is the master document that ties everything together, so they update the will after a major life event and never touch the beneficiary forms sitting quietly at the custodian. When the two documents disagree, the beneficiary form wins, every time.
The mistakes I find most often
A handful of the same errors show up again and again in the accounts I review:
- An outdated beneficiary. An ex-spouse, a beneficiary who has since passed away, or a sibling named decades ago who's no longer close to the family — nothing forces this to update itself when your life changes.
- No contingent beneficiary. If your primary beneficiary predeceases you and there's no backup on file, the account typically defaults to your estate — which routes it straight into probate, the exact outcome a beneficiary designation exists to avoid.
- A minor child named directly. A child can't legally control an inheritance. Naming one directly freezes the account until a Nevada court appoints — and supervises — a guardian of the estate, an expensive and entirely public process most families would rather skip.
- "My estate" named as beneficiary. This deliberately routes the account through probate and can eliminate more favorable, spread-out payout options for whoever eventually inherits it.
The Nevada wrinkle: community property
Nevada is one of just a handful of community-property states, and it changes this conversation in ways most people don't expect. Property acquired during a marriage is generally considered jointly owned by both spouses — including, in many cases, retirement contributions made while married, even if the account is titled in one spouse's name alone. That can give a spouse a legitimate claim on a retirement account even when they're not the person named on the beneficiary form.
Workplace retirement plans add a federal layer on top of that: for 401(k)s and other ERISA-governed plans, federal law generally requires spousal consent before you can name someone other than your spouse as beneficiary. The U.S. Supreme Court's Egelhoff decision confirmed just how far this reaches — the named beneficiary on file with an ERISA plan can control even over what a state divorce decree says. If you've remarried, divorced, or hold retirement money that predates your current marriage, this is exactly the kind of detail worth reviewing with someone who knows Nevada law, not guessing at.
One piece of good news: Nevada has no state estate tax and no state inheritance tax, so beyond federal estate-tax thresholds — which affect a small share of families — what your heirs actually keep in Nevada tends to be more, not less, than in many other states.
Where annuities and life insurance fit in
Annuities and life insurance are two of the cleanest tools for exactly this problem, which is why they're central to how I approach estate and legacy planning for clients. Both pass directly to a named beneficiary, outside probate, usually within weeks rather than the months a Nevada probate case can take. A life insurance policy can also be sized specifically to equalize an inheritance — useful when, say, one adult child is set to inherit a house and you want the others to receive something comparable in cash, without forcing a sale.
Annuities held inside an IRA carry their own beneficiary-planning nuance around required minimum distributions and the SECURE Act's 10-year payout rule for non-spouse beneficiaries — a topic detailed enough that I've written about it separately in how a guaranteed-income annuity can pay your IRA's RMDs.
A simple beneficiary audit
This doesn't need to be complicated, and it doesn't need an attorney to get started — though a Nevada estate attorney is worth involving once real complexity shows up (blended families, special-needs beneficiaries, business interests). Here's the audit I walk clients through:
1. List every account that has a beneficiary designation — every IRA, 401(k) or workplace plan, annuity, and life insurance policy. 2. Pull the actual beneficiary form from each custodian; don't rely on memory or an old paper file. 3. Confirm a primary and a contingent beneficiary are named on each one, spelled correctly, with current addresses or dates of birth on file where required. 4. Re-run this audit after every major life event — marriage, divorce, a birth, a death in the family, or moving a large account to a new custodian.
That last step is the one people skip. A beneficiary review takes fifteen minutes with each custodian. Probate in Nevada can take the better part of a year.