Family comes first. And genuinely you are worried what will happen after you. And so you take a term insurance, invest in mutual funds, insurance or fixed deposit to make sure that they don’t suffer in your absence. While all these are great, a large amount of corpus also lies in the savings account.
No one teaches us what to do in this respect. Did you know that your family can also access your savings account after your death? But it can a lot harder if you don’t put some systems and checks in place.
Here’s what you can do make it easier for your family members to access your bank account.
Whenever you open a saving bank account you have the option to nominate someone. The nominated person will have access to your savings account after your death. Having a nomination will make it easier for your family to get the bank assets in their name. The advantage of filing nominations is that the amount will be transferred to the nominee’s account after producing few legal documents. If you are married, it is better to have your spouse or children as your nominee. So, if you are going to get married, you can change the nominee’s name to your spouse. And if you are already married for some time, check the name of the nominee of all your savings account. You can make the changes accordingly.
While many savings account are held by an individual. Banks also provide the facility of having joint savings accounts. In this type of bank account, you can share your account with your partner. Joint accounts can be handled in two ways:
Either
or survivor:
Here both the account holder has access to the joint account.
For any transaction, the signature of both the account holders is not
important. For example, if a joint account is of husband and wife, both of them
have equal and complete freedom to access the bank account.
Former or survivor:
In this type of clause, the former is the main account holder and has the complete access to the bank account. Survivor is the joint holder but does not have any access. In case of death of the former account holder, all the charge of accounts goes to the survivor.
In this scenario, the death of former account holder, nominee filed will not be considered at first place, the survivor will be the owner of the bank account.
Hence, having a joint account will help your partner keep a track of the money and they won’t face with a difficult position. It is better to opt for a either or survivor mode.
Other way to make sure that your partner can access your savings bank account is by making a power of attorney. POA will give your partner the right to perform all the acts on your behalf. There are two types of power of attorneys: a general POA and a specific POA. A general power of attorney gives your partner the right to conduct a broad number of banking transactions. A specific POA gives only specific rights. However, don’t confuse POA with nomination.
A crisis can knock your door anytime at any point in your life so it is always better to make sure that your spouse won’t face any problem. It is always recommended to opt for former or survivor in a joint account. You can use any of the above options to avoid future inconvenience to your family.
Tags: savings account, investment, family crisis