Saddaughter

Thank you all for the feedback! The discussion has been super useful and makes me hopeful we would win if this continues to escalate. I wasn’t familiar with the term “augmented estate” but did some googling. Even if the IRA counted towards the augmented estate (which it seems unlikely it does here) she couldn’t claim it this way as they weren’t living together for a decade before he died, and she has significant assets of her own (a second house besides the one they owned jointly, two cars, and at least a few hundred thousand dollars she inherited from her mother). She doesn’t need the money at all, just hates me and wants to harass me. Lovely, right? You can see why my dad wasn’t inclined to list her as a beneficiary.. now I just have to hope that dealing with her doesn’t cost so much that the account is drained. I will let you know how this shakes out.

This is in NJ, so not a community property state. If a person names a non-spouse beneficiary on a rollover IRA, does the spouse have any legal basis to claim half or all of this account? No spousal consent form was signed. My dad left his traditional IRA (with Vanguard, a rollover from an employer sponsored 401k) to me when he passed away. My mother, who he was married to but estranged from, has hired a lawyer and is challenging this beneficiary designation. The bank has frozen the account and we now have to “work it out” or go to court. There is not very much money in the account (~50k) so it’s definitely not something worth going to court over if at all possible. I’m bewildered by this as everything I’ve read AND a lawyer I spoke to says she has no legal basis for the claim. I don’t know why the bank is freezing the account if this is so clear cut. Does anyone have any insight into possible nuances to the law around this that we could be missing?