MONEY & INVESTING
Disinherited By Vanguard
Ashlea Ebeling 09.03.07
IS IT TIME TO MOVE YOUR IRA?
Excerpt: In late July the Vanguard group sent 170,000 customers a form letter innocuously labeled: "Change in beneficiary policy will help you simplify your planning." A more candid heading would have been:"Warning! Unless you act, we're about to change who gets your Individual Retirement Accounts when you die."

Vanguard has decided that, as of mid-September, it will require customers to use identical beneficiaries for all IRAs of the same type. All your IRAs holding money rolled from employer pension plans count as the same type and must have the same beneficiaries. Traditional IRAs,both pretax and aftertax, are a second type. Roth IRAs are a third.

If you're one of 170,000 customers who now have different beneficiaries named for separate IRAs of the same type or different beneficiaries for different mutual funds within a single IRA, Vanguard will apply the newest beneficiary form to all your IRAs of one type--unless you contact Vanguard and direct otherwise. If two forms were submitted at the sametime, Vanguard will treat the one it processed later as newer. This is crucial, since it's the form--not your will--that determines who gets your IRAs.......,....