Remarried household with children from prior relationships. QTIP trust, beneficiary conflicts, child support obligations, competing inheritance goals.
BL-01 is the testing surface where prenuptial agreements, QTIP trust mechanics, and competing beneficiary designations across prior and current marriages turn ordinary planning software into a multi-party reconciliation problem.
BL-01 represents the remarried household with children from at least one prior relationship — a structurally distinct planning case that ordinary married-with-kids software handles incorrectly by default. The testing surface concentrates in four interlocking areas. First, beneficiary-designation conflicts: ERISA pre-empts state law on qualified-plan beneficiaries (Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, 2001), meaning a 401(k) names whoever was last designated regardless of subsequent divorce decrees, while IRAs follow custodial-agreement defaults — a household with a current spouse and prior-marriage children almost always has at least one account with a stale designation. Second, QTIP trusts and the marital-deduction election (§2056(b)(7)) become operationally important: the QTIP funds the current spouse for life with the remainder passing to the decedent's biological children, but the §2056(b)(7) election and the §2519 disposition rules create planning corners. Third, child-support obligations from a prior relationship sit on the cash-flow statement as a non-discretionary outflow, often imputed against gross income for guideline purposes and not deductible after the 2017 TCJA changes. Fourth, prenuptial and postnuptial agreements typically structure asset characterization (separate vs marital property), affecting both divorce-scenario modeling and estate-planning beneficiary flow.
Cash flow looks like an affluent dual-income family — median combined income $174k, median net worth $704k, 75% homeowners, every household carries at least one dependent — but the planning surface is more complex than the income alone suggests. Median adult age is 44 (range 31-55), corresponding to second-marriage households where the prior-marriage children are typically in late high school through early adulthood, an inflection point for education-funding decisions made under custody and child-support constraints. 11 of 12 households file MFJ; the one outlier reflects the still-occasional case where filing separately advantages prior-marriage support obligations or specific deduction interactions.
What separates BL-01 from a generic dual-income family archetype is not income or wealth — it is the legal and beneficiary structure layered on top. A-03 (Dual-Income Professional Couple) at the same income band has none of the QTIP, prenup, child-support, or stale-beneficiary surface. P-01 (Peak Earner — Corporate Executive) at higher income has none of it either. BL-01 is the archetype where the household graph has to model two parental lines, two sets of children, and two sets of estate-planning intentions that have to be reconciled into a single plan.
Aggregated across the 12 BL-01 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Eric (48) and Tiffany (52) sit slightly above the BL-01 net-worth median at $790k against $175k combined finance-industry income — a peak-accumulation Texas MFJ household with four young dependents aged 5, 6, 7, and 10. The corpus does not tag any dependent as a step-child or carry a prior-marriage marker, so this rep is the household-state surface against which BL-01-specific planning would layer (the rep exercises the dual-income family balance sheet — $188k mortgage, modest $7k credit-card and $3k student-loan tails, $484k investable — rather than direct evidence of a blended structure). They are on track for debt payoff but behind on a $3.3M retirement target by roughly $4.6k/mo, making the diagnostic question whether the software, once a QTIP layer or prior-marriage child-support obligation is added, can still resolve the spousal-only retirement contribution and beneficiary-reconciliation flow against this starting balance sheet.
Every BL-01 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Estate-planning software vendors use BL-01 to validate multi-party beneficiary visualization, QTIP-vs-disclaimer-trust comparisons, and the stale-401(k)-beneficiary alert flow that catches Egelhoff-pre-emption risk. Family-law-adjacent fintech (divorce-planning calculators, child-support modeling tools used by mediators) tests against the prior-relationship support outflows. Wealth platforms serving the affluent advisor channel use BL-01 to exercise household-graph data models that have to represent two parental lines, ex-spouse beneficiaries (or explicitly removed ex-spouse beneficiaries), and competing inheritance goals across asset titling, life-insurance ownership, and account beneficiary designations.
BL-01 is calibrated to remarried households with children from at least one prior relationship and a living current spouse. Widowed-and-remarried households where one prior spouse has died (changing the QTIP trigger and SBP-style survivor benefits) are a subset present in the corpus but not the dominant case — H-04 covers the widowed-HNW spouse profile without the remarriage layer. Divorce-in-progress households belong in S-01; the BL-01 corpus assumes the second marriage has occurred and is stable. Couples with stepchildren only (one spouse had children from a prior relationship, the other did not) are represented, but the more complex 'his, hers, and ours' three-set case is a narrower slice. Same-sex remarried households with children from prior heterosexual relationships fit the structural pattern but the X-03 LGBTQ+ Household archetype is the closer match when the LGBTQ+-specific planning surface (Obergefell-era estate planning, second-parent adoption status) is the focus.
Household-structure prevalence during v3 synthesis was informed by the American Community Survey's data on remarriage and stepfamily formation and the Pew Research Center's stepfamily statistics. Income and wealth bands were anchored to the affluent percentile bands of the Survey of Consumer Finances, calibrated for the dual-earner second-marriage profile in the 40-55 age band. Child-support obligation amounts reflect plausible state-guideline outputs (Texas, New Jersey, and Florida guideline formulas inform the state-distribution choice) rather than specific case data. QTIP-trust presence is implied by the planning posture, not directly observed in synthesis — buyers building estate-planning UX should treat the QTIP layer as the testing target their software should add. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code.
A-03 is the dual-income professional couple without the prior-relationship layer — same income band, no QTIP, no prior-marriage child support, no stale-beneficiary risk. Use A-03 as the simpler base case.
S-01 is divorce-in-progress; BL-01 assumes the second marriage has occurred. Use S-01 for active asset-division, QDRO drafting, and dissolution-of-marriage cash-flow modeling.
E-02 is the estate-planning grantor at higher net worth where trust selection (CRT, CLAT, GRAT) dominates the testing surface. BL-01 is the blended-family complication that may layer on top of an E-02 plan.
H-04 is the widowed HNW spouse; choose H-04 when the planning surface is post-bereavement (step-up in basis, portability election, SBP claim) rather than pre-bereavement reconciliation across two living households.
BL-01 — Blended Family / Step-Children represents a remarried household with children from at least one prior relationship. The defining feature is not income or wealth but the legal-and-beneficiary structure: QTIP trusts, prenuptial agreements, child-support obligations from a prior relationship, and competing beneficiary designations across current spouse and prior-marriage children.
Income and wealth profiles overlap, but A-03 is structurally a single-parental-line household — both spouses' children are mutual, no prior-marriage support obligations, no stale ERISA beneficiaries from a prior plan. BL-01 adds the multi-party beneficiary, custody, and estate-reconciliation surface that A-03 does not exercise.
Yes — child-support obligations from a prior relationship appear as a non-discretionary monthly outflow in households where the structural pattern indicates one. Synthesis treated post-2018 support orders as non-deductible to the payor and non-taxable to the recipient consistent with TCJA changes. Buyers should layer their own state-guideline modeling on top for precise amounts.
The corpus represents the planning posture (current spouse plus prior-marriage children) that typically calls for QTIP structuring, but does not populate explicit trust accounts in the household balance sheet. Buyers building estate-planning visualization should treat BL-01 as the household state on which to layer the QTIP, disclaimer-trust, or marital-trust modeling.
BL-01 is tagged for B06, B10, B12, B14, B19, and B27 — covering home-purchase, estate-planning-adjacent, insurance and beneficiary scenarios, retirement, cash-flow / debt, and behavioral overlays. See the right-hand sidebar for the bundles that ship BL-01 households.
No. The shipped 1,451-household v3 corpus is frozen as of synthesis; drift was confirmed on 2026-05-09. Per CLAUDE.md §9, v3 BL-01 households should be treated as a static reference dataset rather than as a regenerable output.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
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