After marriage, most people update their nominations and assume their affairs are in order. They are not. A nominee is only a caretaker who receives the money — not the person legally entitled to keep it.
The distinction matters enormously, and the full explanation lives in the family stage. This page is the marriage-specific nudge to understand it before you assume you are done.
Updating nominations is one of the first sensible things a couple does after marrying — on bank accounts, insurance, mutual funds and EPF. It is necessary, but it is widely misunderstood, and the misunderstanding causes real distress later.
The main misunderstanding
A nominee is the person authorised to receive your assets when you die — but under Indian law they generally hold that money as a trustee for your legal heirs, not as its owner. Nomination decides who the institution hands the money to. It does not decide who is ultimately entitled to keep it. Those can be different people, and when they are, families end up in conflict at the worst possible time.
This is why, after marriage, updating nominations is not enough. If you want to control who actually inherits — rather than merely who collects — you need a will. For a newly married couple with few complications this can be simple, but it is the document that actually carries legal force over your wishes.
Why newly married couples must update more than nominations
Before marriage, your legal heirs were typically your parents. After marriage, your spouse enters the picture, and older nominations and unstated intentions can now conflict — a policy still naming a parent, no will expressing what you actually want, and two sides of a family with different assumptions.
Sorting this out while both of you are alive and well is a quiet afternoon's work. Leaving it is how grieving families end up in disputes that the person who died never intended.
Read the detailed explanation here
The complete treatment — the nominee-versus-heir distinction confirmed by the Supreme Court, why a young family needs a will even more for guardianship than for assets, and how to make a valid will simply — is set out in full in the family stage.
Read it here: Will, guardian and nomination: what families should do →
Marriage is the right moment to start this, not because anything is likely to happen, but because getting it right is easy now and painful to fix later. Update your nominations — and understand that doing so is the beginning of putting your affairs in order, not the end.