IRA with no beneficiary
Please help. We live in California. My husband sadly passed away. When he set up his IRA no body made him
aware of making me the beneficiary. The form is blank
As we live in California a community property state will i automatically claim his IRA as his wife? He did leave
a very simple will where he stated that he leaves me his IRA account
When I called the company they seemed to think it needed to go to a probate court
As he left with with not much money is this something very hard to do
Any help is much appreciated
Permalink Submitted by Alan - IRA critic on Fri, 2020-11-20 17:20
Sorry to hear of your loss. Under the CA small estate law, if his estate including the IRA is under 166,250 it will qualify for a simplified affidavit procedure in the probate court. If you complete that you should inherit the entire IRA account. But you should also check the beneficiary wording in the IRA agreement because some custodians specify that the surviving spouse is the automatic beneficiary. In that case, you could avoid the probate court.