Missing Beneficiary Insurance is suitable for both testate and intestate estates where a beneficiary is known to exist but has simply, gone missing.
Missing Beneficiary Insurance is designed to protect the Personal Representative and the beneficiaries should a missing beneficiary come forward at a later date. The cost of dealing with the claim is paid by the policy, and if successful the policy would pay the claimant their entitlement.
The cost of purchasing Missing Beneficiary Insurance varies from case to case. This is based on the risks involved and the value of the entitlement owed to the missing person. For this reason, it can be thousands of pounds.
So, is it worth it?
For one of our cases, we had two missing lines on the family tree who we were unable to trace despite our best efforts.
Having presented the protection policy to the Personal Representative, they decided to purchase it.
A year after we distributed the estate, we received a phone call from the Personal Representative — one of the missing relatives had contacted them. They had been working on their own family tree and came across the S.27 Notice we placed in the London Gazette, leading them directly to the Personal Representative.
Having the Missing Beneficiary Insurance policy in place meant the newly found beneficiary would receive their entitlement without impacting the other beneficiaries and Personal Representative, who we had already paid their entitlements.
The cherry on top was helping to facilitate contact between long lost family members.
For this particular case, purchasing the Missing Beneficiary Insurance was worth every penny. Although such a decision is for the Personal Representative to make, we always urge our clients to carefully consider the risks.
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