Retired? What Married Couples Should Revisit in Their Estate Plan

You spent your working years building the plan. Retirement is the day the plan is supposed to start doing its job — and, for a lot of couples, the day it quietly stops fitting.

Most estate plans are drafted in the middle of life. The children were young, one or both of you were earning, and the retirement accounts were still growing. Retirement flips nearly every one of those facts. Your income now comes out of the accounts instead of going into them. Your children are adults with careers and tax problems of their own. And the law governing inherited retirement accounts has changed substantially since 2019.

Here is what married couples should look at, in the order we usually look at it.

Start With the Documents That Work While You Are Both Alive

The most likely event in the next decade is not death. It is a stretch of weeks or months when one of you cannot make decisions.

That is what a durable power of attorney, a health care directive and durable power of attorney for health care, and a HIPAA authorization are for. Done well, they are the difference between your spouse handling matters privately and your family filing a guardianship or conservatorship case in probate court to get authority a signed document could have supplied.

Two questions retired couples often have not asked:

•     Who is the successor? Naming each other is natural, but the event that incapacitates one spouse can involve both. Name a successor agent, and a successor after that.

•     Is your agent still the right person? An agent you named twenty years ago may now be older than you are. Adult children who were teenagers when the documents were signed may be the better choice today.

Confirm How Your Assets Actually Pass

Your will does not control most of what you own. Retirement accounts, life insurance, annuities, payable-on-death and transfer-on-death accounts, jointly held property, and Missouri real estate covered by a recorded beneficiary deed all pass by their own terms, regardless of what your will says.

That makes beneficiary designations part of your estate plan, not paperwork. Pull the current designation on every account and read it. We routinely find accounts still naming a former spouse, a sibling who has died, a trust that was later revoked, or nothing at all — and old 401(k) balances left behind at a former employer, still carrying a designation from the year that job started.

One recurring mistake worth flagging: naming your estate as the beneficiary of a retirement account. It rarely helps, it drags the account through probate, and it usually shortens the payout period for whoever ends up with the money.

The SECURE Act Changed What Your Children Will Inherit

If your plan was drafted before 2020, this is the section that matters most.

The ten-year rule. For most adult children, the "stretch IRA" is gone. A child who inherits your traditional IRA generally must empty it within ten years of your death. Under final IRS regulations that took effect in 2025, if you die on or after your required beginning date, that child must also take an annual required distribution in years one through nine and clear the account by year ten.

The consequence is a tax problem more than a legal one. A fifty-five-year-old daughter in her peak earning years may be forced to recognize a large IRA as ordinary income at her highest lifetime rates.

Who still gets a longer payout. Certain "eligible designated beneficiaries" may still stretch distributions over life expectancy: a surviving spouse, your minor child (until age 21), a beneficiary who is disabled or chronically ill, and a beneficiary not more than ten years younger than you.

Naming your spouse — more options than before. A surviving spouse can roll the account into their own IRA or keep it as an inherited IRA. SECURE 2.0 added a third path: beginning in 2024, a surviving spouse may elect to be treated as the deceased spouse for required minimum distribution purposes, which can delay distributions until the deceased spouse would have reached their required beginning date and allow use of the more favorable Uniform Lifetime Table. Which option wins depends on your ages and the survivor's cash needs — worth pre-planning rather than improvising in the month after a funeral.

If a trust is your beneficiary, have it re-read. Trust language written for the old stretch rules can misfire now. A conduit trust may be forced to push the entire account out to a beneficiary in year ten; an accumulation trust may trap that income at compressed trust tax rates. Trusts for a spouse, and trusts for a child with a disability, deserve particular attention.

Use the Years Between Retirement and RMD Age

Required minimum distributions now begin at age 73 for those born between 1951 and 1959, and at 75 for those born in 1960 or later. The window between your last paycheck and your first RMD is often the lowest-tax stretch of your life — and the best time for partial Roth conversions. Roth IRAs have no lifetime RMDs, and Roth 401(k) accounts no longer require them either. A Roth still passes under the ten-year rule, but it passes income-tax-free.

Two more items for this window:

•     Plan for the survivor's tax bracket. After the first death, the survivor files as a single taxpayer. Similar income, higher rates. Couples are frequently surprised by this.

•     Give from the IRA if you give at all. Starting at age 70½, you can direct up to $111,000 per person in 2026 from an IRA to charity as a qualified charitable distribution. It counts toward your RMD and stays out of your income entirely — often better than writing a check and claiming a deduction.

Federal Estate Tax Is Generous Right Now. Missouri Adds None.

For 2026 the federal basic exclusion is $15 million per person, indexed going forward, and the annual gift exclusion is $19,000. Missouri imposes no separate estate or inheritance tax.

That good news creates its own trap. Formula-based credit shelter or "A/B" trust provisions drafted when the exemption was $1 million or $5 million can now overfund one share, sideline a surviving spouse in practice, and give up a valuable second step-up in basis to save a tax that will never be owed. For most couples today, preserving basis matters more than avoiding estate tax.

And portability is not automatic. Claiming a deceased spouse's unused exemption requires filing a federal estate tax return within the applicable deadline even when no tax is due. Surviving spouses miss this regularly.

When to Review

Every three to five years is a reasonable rhythm — sooner after a death, marriage, or divorce in the family; a move to another state; a significant change in your accounts; a beneficiary's disability, creditor problem, or divorce; or a change in the law.

Talk It Through Before You Need To

The best time to make these decisions is while both spouses are healthy and able to say what they want. If your plan has not been reviewed since you retired — or since 2019 — it is worth a conversation with an estate planning attorney who can look at your documents and your beneficiary designations together.