How to find your life insurance policy’s beneficiaries?
There are many duties that come with being the executor of another person’s will, one of which might be to allocate money from a life insurance policy death benefit to its beneficiaries. But what if you can’t find the beneficiaries? This probably happens more often than you think.
The first thing you will want to do to track down a beneficiary is to ask those related to the deceased. It may be that a relative or close friend knows of the beneficiary’s whereabouts and how you can go about getting in touch with them.
If that doesn’t turn up any leads, it’s time to contact the insurance company. While the insurance company will have details of the policy’s beneficiaries on hand, they won’t have current contact information for that person unless the policy holder provided them with this information before they passed away. It could be that the policy holder didn’t even know how to get in touch with the beneficiary, so this avenue may produce few if any results.
Another thing you can do as the executor is go through the deceased’s paperwork, including any correspondence that they had with the insurance company. Perhaps there’s some mention of their contact information there. Next, you can try your luck using one of the many public records sites online. While you may not be able to narrow down the list of results to the right person, you should be able to come up with a smaller list of possible beneficiaries that you can try to contact. Be warned, however, that a lot of people will want to claim that they are the heir if you mention it’s in relation to a life insurance policy benefit.
If you still haven’t had any luck finding the beneficiary, there is really no other option but to enlist the help of a private investigator.
Once you’ve chosen an investigator, preferably one that specializes in tracking down missing beneficiaries, you will want to put together a file containing all of the information you have on the missing beneficiary. This could include their previous addresses, their birth date and relationship to the deceased. Don’t think that any amount or type of information will not be helpful to the investigator as they may even be able to determine that they were old school mates from telling them which college they went to and the program they took.
