His Ex Is Getting His $1 Million Retirement Account. They Broke Up in 1989. - WSJ

Jeffrey Rolison and Margaret Sjostedt dated in the 1980s. Now, almost 40 years after they broke up, she stands to inherit his $1 million retirement account. The reason she might get the money is that in 1987, Rolison listed Sjostedt on a handwritten form as the sole beneficiary of his workplace retirement account. He never changed the beneficiary designation and died in 2015.

Standing in her way are Rolison’s brothers, who learned about Sjostedt’s claim to the money weeks after his death on a phone call from their estate lawyer. They don’t think he could have intended to leave the money to her. “We were shocked,” said his brother Brian, a mechanic. The brothers have since been fighting his former employer, Procter & Gamble, in federal court to wrest the retirement money out of the hands of Sjostedt, now Margaret Losinger.

The battle over Rolison’s money is a stark reminder that the beneficiary forms on retirement accounts, life-insurance policies and bank accounts matter. In most cases, they trump the will even if they were filled out decades prior.

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Under federal law, employers are generally required to pay out these retirement accounts to the last recorded beneficiary, or a surviving spouse if the spouse hasn’t filed a waiver. That could be a name on a 3×5 card filled out decades ago, as in Rolison’s case. Or it could be a name entered online. Adding to the confusion: Some employer plans, including P&G’s, haven’t integrated the old paper forms into their online systems.

Rolison met Losinger, who goes by Peggy, at a park playing Frisbee, and they started dating in their early 20s, according to court documents. Later, they moved to Sullivan County, Pa., where she waitressed and he got a job on the floor at a P&G plant that makes Pampers diapers and Bounty paper towels. After a year on the job, in 1987, he signed up for the P&G profit-sharing and savings plans, and filled out a beneficiary card, listing her as cohabitor. Peggy moved out two years later, got married the next year and had two children, according to court documents.

“I wanted marriage and children and he did not,” Losinger testified.

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Rolison died at 59, single and childless.

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The ex-girlfriend, now 68, stands to inherit the entirety of Rolison’s P&G plan accounts. The total came to nearly $750,000 when he died and had grown to $1.15 million by 2020.

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Rolison’s P&G retirement savings, meanwhile, still sit in money-market funds, awaiting distribution.

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