Appointing a life insurance beneficiary

Huge amount of life insurance stays unclaimed

Now comes the dirty secret of most insurance companies.

You might be unpleasantly surprised to learn that life insurance companies don't have a legal obligation to proactively notify your beneficiaries!

Insurance companies don't have a legal obligation to proactively notify your beneficiaries if anything were to happen to you!

Yes, you read that correctly – they will know that something has happened to you, they will know who your beneficiaries are, appointed in the policy by you, but they are not required to notify them! So your spouse or children might never become aware of the policy and receive the proceeds from it.

The blunt truth is that insurance companies simply don’t have any incentive to notify your heirs. It’s way better for them to have the money stay with them.

Let’s see how big the problem is.

How big is the problem?

The famous Californian attorney James L. Cunningham, Jr. puts it well in his book Savvy Estate Planning: “According to CBS News, about $1 billion in life insurance claims goes unpaid every year. That’s because even though the insurance company knows you are dead, they have no affirmative obligation to reach out and pay the money to your beneficiaries. The beneficiary has to submit a claim, but if the beneficiary doesn’t know about the policy, that claim will never be submitted. The insurance company knows you have passed, they know who the beneficiary is, but if no one steps forward, the company holds on to the money. I find this shocking.”

$1 billion per year in the US alone and only for life insurances. How big is the problem of protecting all types of assets from these risks? As you can see, it’s huge. As of 2020, so-called unclaimed assets approach $100B just in the US. Latest reports for the UK show £77B. Globally, we are talking about trillions of dollars. And the upward trend is alarming: a $5B increase per year in the USA alone.

New York Times “There Are Billions in Unclaimed Assets Out There. Some Could Be Yours.” Government agencies have tens of billions of dollars’ worth of bank accounts, insurance policies and other forgotten holdings.

CNN “$58 billion unclaimed: Is some of it yours?” “Unclaimed property comes from a variety of sources, including abandoned bank accounts and stock holdings, unclaimed life insurance payouts and forgotten pension benefits.”

Is this problem specific to life insurance?

No. This problem relates to most asset types, not only life insurance.

Did your bank tell you how they would identify and notify your heirs if you abandoned your bank account?

Did the asset management company tell you how they would notify your heirs if anything happened to you? Did they ask you to nominate heirs at all?

The reality is that most asset management tools aim at protecting the value of the assets which they hold but not their ownership.

Traditional asset protection tools such as trusts and insurances focus on protecting the value of the asset but not the ownership.

For example, insuring real estate protects against climate disasters. An asset protection trust can protect an asset’s value. But all these asset protection tools do not guarantee or target proactively protection of asset ownership.

You would certainly not be happy knowing that your asset had preserved its value but was not in the hands of your family. And as we saw, we are talking of billions of dollars just in the US. Per year!

How does DGLegacy protect your life insurance?

With the DGLegacy application, you can protect your personal assets against unforeseen events. You can connect your preferred beneficiary with your preferred assets, at the time you choose – while ensuring they get the support they need in the process of claiming.

With DGLegacy, you can protect all types of assets. It is also easy to keep your list of assets and beneficiaries up to date.

This way, in the event of anything unforeseen happening to you, your loved ones:

Are aware of your assets
Can identify and locate your assets
Can minimize the chance of unclaimed assets.

This is achieved with the following easy steps:

Catalog assets and passwords

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Detecting if something happens to you

Informing your loved ones about the assigned assets and passwords

Support for your loved ones

Catalog assets and passwords

You catalog the assets and passwords that you want to protect via DGLegacy, with the minimum basic information about the assets that will allow your beneficiaries to identify and locate them.

We don’t ask for confidential information such as your bank account number, the value of your stock options, or financial account numbers!

Next step

Designate beneficiaries and trustees

Beneficiaries are the people whom you appoint to be informed about the assets and passwords that you assign to them. These are usually your partner, your children or your extended family members, such as siblings and parents.

You can choose whether the beneficiaries are to be notified at the time you create the asset or only in the case of an unforeseen event.

If your beneficiaries are, for example, elderly people or children, they might not be proficient with the type of assets assigned to them. In that case, we recommend that you assign trustees for each of your assets. If something happens to you, they can help the beneficiaries to locate their assigned assets and claim ownership.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol

The custom-engineered Heartbeat protocol of DGLegacy verifies that you are OK and detects whether anything unforeseen has happened to you.

It is a safe procedure which also aims to eliminate the possibility of false detections of unforeseen events at any cost.

This is implemented through a multistep process, described on the How It Works page.

Next step

Heartbeat protocol triggering (unforeseen event detection)

If there is no confirmation in response to any of the reminder emails or phone calls, part of the Heartbeat protocol, the system detects that an unforeseen event has happened to you.

Then the notifications which you have configured into the system about the catalogued assets and the associated beneficiaries and trustees are triggered.

Next step

Support for your loved ones

Our ultimate goal is to provide you with the right service to protect your assets and secure your loved ones’ inheritance.

Our team of experts worked with a renowned law firm to offer additional protection for your loved ones through the legal package “Guide and Inform”, part of the Platinum subscription.

In the case of an unforeseen event, the law company will engage with the beneficiaries to guide and help them in the process of claiming the assets you’ve assigned to them.

DGLegacy is great for protecting my assets and my family. So far I was storing my assets’ information on a google sheet shared with my wife, but I always worried that my assets will be lost if …

Victor

Strategic Alliances Manager - dmarcian

This is a service that could make you sleep well in a time of crisis. Knowing your family is sorted out and you have every valuable under control is priceless.

Vlad

Senior Engineering Manager - VMware

Atlanta, Georgia, United States.

Finally a peace of mind. I always wanted a tool where I could see a snapshot of my assets, track them, and decide what to share, with whom and when.
Because my assets were stored in different systems …

Ingrid Henke

Founder - ARRIVA relocation services

Berlin, Germany.

Knowing that DGLegacy exists is such a relief! Up till now, I’ve put my head in the sand when it came to thinking about my assets because it was so stressful with no real solution in sight. I ca…

Alara Vural

Founder - Alara Vural Coaching

London, UK.

I have been using a secure vault and password manager for years but I always worried that my family won’t be aware of most of this information if they need it. I really like that DGLegacy combines p…

Agnieszka Michalik

Software Architect - HERE Technologies

Berlin, Germany

DGLegacy enables me to easily track and organize all my passwords and assets.
The most important thing is that the digital inheritance capability of the service ensures that loved ones will be informe…

Stella Schmitz

International HR Executive