Naming someone in your will to raise your children decides who they will live with. It decides nothing about who controls the money they inherit. Those are two separate roles under New York law, and the distance between them is where I see Queens families run into difficulty.
Mistake One: Assuming the guardian you named handles the inheritance
The person raising your child is the guardian of the person. Money left to a child under eighteen requires a second, separate appointment: a guardian of the property of a minor, obtained by petition under Article 17 of the New York Surrogate’s Court Procedure Act at the Queens County Surrogate’s Court on Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica. That guardian usually has to post a bond, ask the Court for permission before spending, and file an accounting every year. The relative raising your children in Ridgewood and the person authorized to pay their tuition are not necessarily the same person, and neither one decides alone.
Mistake Two: Leaving the beneficiary form exactly as it was
Life insurance, a pension, an individual retirement account, a union death benefit: every one of these pays according to the designation form on file, and that form controls no matter what your will says. I have watched carefully drafted plans collapse because a policy from a first job still named a nine-year-old who is now thirty. Naming a minor on that form is the most common way I see a court proceeding created by accident.
Mistake Three: Counting on someone to correct it later
New York does allow a repair after a death. An executor can transfer property to a custodian under the New York Uniform Transfers to Minors Act, commonly called UTMA. But that route is capped, it requires court authorization above the limit, and the custodianship created that way ends when the child turns eighteen rather than twenty-one. Three years of protection are lost for no reason other than timing.
That is why I advise parents across Forest Hills, Astoria and Flushing to handle two things in the same week rather than one at a time. Create a trust inside your will, or a living trust, naming the trustee you want and the ages at which money is released. Then pull every beneficiary form out of the drawer and point it at that trust.
Neither step is expensive, and neither takes long. Together they keep the Surrogate’s Court out of decisions that belong to your family, and they let you choose the age at which a child actually receives what you left, rather than accepting the one the statute assigns.
If your loved one left behind an inheritance which needs to be protected for a minor child, contact us today for a free phone consultation.
Contributed by Roman Aminov, Esq, a Queens estate attorney in New York City.
Roman Aminov Estate Law firm of Queens
147-17 Union Tpke, Kew Gardens Hills, NY 11367, United States
P59P+93 Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, NY, USA
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