Keep things simple and have each of you own your own policy.

If you have done some estate planning and have created revocable living trusts, you may want the beneficiary to be your trust rather than your spouse. This becomes extra important in the case of you both dying and the money going to your daughter.

That being the case, there's no obvious benefit from you and your wife cross-owning the policies. Whoever dies first, the other gets an unlimited estate tax exclusion and receives the insurance proceeds as beneficiary.

Ari,
You probably shouldn't name minor children as secondary beneficiaries. You should look at naming your children's guardian(s) (as stated in your will) as secondary beneficiaries.

i would have to agree with everyone's post. Make sure the beneficiaries are correct and don't worry about the ownership.

I agree with David. Keep it simple, and make sure you get your estate plan properly established. In advance of buying insurance if estate taxes are an issue.

If your estate is large enough to be taxed after it passes to your spouse, you may need to consider other ownership arrangements, to keep the insurance proceeds out of the estate (an irrevocable life insurance trust, for example). In that event, it's better to have the ownership established when purchasing the policy as opposed to changing it later (due to a 3-year look back rule on ownership changes that would cause the proceeds to be included in your estate).

Ari,

The answer to this question can be complicated. A key question is, what do you want to accomplish?

If the insured is the owner of the policy, when he/she dies, its value is included in the estate. If it’s desirable to have the value excluded from an estate (to avoid going over the estate tax limit), then having the beneficiary own the policy might be a good strategy. But in this case, it sounds like the beneficiary is your wife, who already gets an unlimited estate tax exclusion as your spouse. So whichever of you dies first can pass an unlimited amount w/o estate tax to the other.

Let’s say that you own your policy and your wife, the primary beneficiary, dies before you. You get the benefits from her policy, assuming you’re her beneficiary. Then, before you have time to make any beneficiary changes, you die. Now the proceeds of your policy either go to a contingent beneficiary or your estate. In that event, all the proceeds are back in your estate. Making your wife the owner of your policy would not have prevented this outcome. In this scenario, you are your wife’s heir, so even if you’d swapped policy ownerships, you’d end up inheriting ownership of your policy anyway after she died.

Transferring ownership of the policy could make sense if there were a non-spouse involved, or there could be some other reason to have a spouse own the policy - but so far the information you’ve provided doesn’t make it sound like anything is gained by cross-ownership. Since these are term policies, there’s no cash value building up, so the only thing at stake is the death benefit.

Can you say a bit more about what you hope to do by shifting ownership of the policies? Are you each other's beneficiaries?

The intention is to be each other's beneficiaries, with our daughter and/or subsequent children, to be secondary beneficiaries. It sounds like this structure works just fine and is uncomplicated.