Your beneficiary designations

Life changes often. Now may be a good time to review your retirement account beneficiaries.

When you open a retirement account at Heartland or any financial institution, you select a primary, and sometimes, a contingent beneficiary—a person or entity who will receive the balance of this account on the event of your death.

According to a Supreme Court ruling in 2009, regardless of other existing legal documents or what your intent may be, this document, the “Beneficiary Designation Form,” controls who receives the proceeds from your retirement plans.

Based on the significance of this document, whenever you have a life change, it is critical to consider how this change might affect who you want to receive your retirement benefits. Outdated, incomplete or inaccurate beneficiary designation forms can cause a lifetime of savings to be distributed to someone other than who you really want to receive the distribution.

What can you do?

Take time to review all of your retirement account beneficiary forms from 401ks, 403bs, pension plans, IRAs, Roth IRAs and SEPs on a regular basis, but particularly when you have a life change, including:

Marriage	Review of Estate Plan
Divorce	Creation or Change to a Will
Birth of a Child	Incapacity of a Beneficiary (mentally or physically)
Death of an Existing Beneficiary	Change in Laws that may impact Beneficiary Designations

Heartland can help

At Heartland, you can review and change your beneficiary designation at any time.  

• To verify your current beneficiary designation, Shareholder Services would be happy to help at 1-800-432-7856.  We are available from 8 a.m. CST to 7 p.m. CST Monday through Friday.
   
• To update or change your beneficiary designation, complete an IRA Account Maintenance Form available on our website or by calling Heartland.

This is intended for general information only. The Heartland Funds do not offer tax or legal advice. Please refer specific questions to your tax or legal advisor.