Updating Beneficiaries on Your Accounts
Due to some of the changes going on in my life, I just went through and updated all the beneficiaries on my accounts at Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab.
This was something I was worried about being difficult, and my tendency towards procrastination was setting in, but I doubled down and got to work and each of the brokerages made it remarkably easy to update.
Instructions:
At all three brokerages, in the top navigation bar of your account, you’ll click ‘Profile’ (Vanguard calls it ‘Profile & Account Settings).
On that main Profile page on all three there’s a link for ‘Beneficiaries.’ Click that link and you can update them account by account.
I noticed that Vanguard and Fidelity made it really easy to copy over beneficiaries from another account, so if you plan to have the same beneficiaries, it’s really easy to enter once and then copy over.
I suspect Schwab does the same, but I didn’t have multiple accounts there to test.
Why name beneficiaries:
Really simply, it takes only a few minutes and it ensures that your assets are distributed to the people you want after your death.
This is really important.