For most couples, their home and retirement accounts are their largest assets. As couples begin to separate their lives, including divvying up finances, they must determine whether they can afford to hold on to that asset in order to nest - where children live in the family home full time while the parents rotate in and out. Will they rent a second apartment to share when they’re not on parenting duty? Will the mortgage on the family home still be paid as it had been? Who wil

Many couples don’t consider 529 accounts carefully when splitting up, and other families make a crucial mistake that can leave a mess if somebody dies. If you’ve managed to start a 529 college savings account, pat yourself on the back. You’ll be glad you set one up — and you’re lucky you have money to spare, since plenty of people don’t. But each of these accounts can involve up to four people: the account owner, the spouse of that owner, the beneficiary and the successor. An

More than anything else in the world, Erin Millender longed to be a mother. She already had a day care picked out, a Pack ’n Play stashed in her basement. She’d tried Chinese pregnancy teas and midnight fertility ceremonies under a full moon in the Caribbean Sea. Whatever it took to have a child. Now in her mid-40s, Millender knew she was running out of time. She had already spent several years attempting in vitro fertilization, with no luck. She’d decided to give I.V.F. one

In 2023, more than 1.8 million Americans got divorced. For many Americans, retirement accounts represent their largest assets, and divorce often means dividing those accounts between them and their former spouses. For the portion of a retirement account retained by a plan participant after a divorce, updating the beneficiary designation is an important follow-up step. In cases where the intent is to remove a former spouse as beneficiary of that retained portion, that update m