28 Oct Who gets this inheritance if a beneficiary dies?

Q. Say parents have wills and their contingent beneficiaries are their two adult children. If one of the adult children dies before the parents, who gets that contingent beneficiary’s share? Would the beneficiary’s spouse or the grandchildren get it? What does the will have to say so it goes to the grandchildren?
— Planning ahead

A. It’s a great question.

The language of the will will govern what happens with each beneficiary’s share.

Some wills divide the remainder among the then living children, which would mean the surviving sibling would receive the entire estate, said Catherine Romania, an estate planning attorney with Witman Stadtmauer in Florham Park.

She said the more common approach is for will language to say: “I give, devise and bequeath my residuary estate to my descendants, per stirpes.”

“Providing this language in the will means that if a child predeceases the testator and the predeceased child has surviving descendants, that predeceased child’s share will go to that predeceased child’s descendants,” Romania said.

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This story was originally published on Oct. 28, 2021.

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