Estate Planning as a Career

Medical Power of Attorney

Setting up a medical power of attorney along with a living will is an extremely important step in the estate planning process. A medical power of attorney or a living will describes the type of health procedures that can or cannot be done on us, should it be needed. This is based on our desire. Everybody has different desires, but many utilize the medical power of attorney to eliminate unnecessary prolonged life. Essentially stating, legally, whether we would like to be resuscitated if we end up in a non-responsive state. Would you want to be artificially kept alive for an extended period of time if you were in a vegetative state? The answer may vary, depending on the individual. The important thing is that the medical power of attorney and living well provide the legal instructions that describe your desires.

The need for both living wills and the medical power of attorney was made famous by the Terri Schiavo case. If Terri Schiavo would have had a medical power of attorney things may have been quite a bit easier for her family. What she and her case can teach us all is the importance of proper estate planning, at any stage. We never know when our moment will come, so planning early is the wisest step we can take. Accidents happen all the time. If something were to happen to you, would your family be protected? Would your desires be met? Would your legacy be remembered? If the the answer is no, you probably haven’t done the necessary estate planning. Proper estate planning may include setting up a living will, medical power of attorney, a living trust, proper life insurance, and much more. Meeting with a qualified estate planning advisor can help you and your family meet your estate planning needs. Make sure to include your family in the process. All too often, families are unaware of their love Read the rest of this entry »

Often during the final years of a dear friend’s or relative’s life some person or persons will take over the task of caring for their sick and elderly friend or relative to a greater degree than the other people in their lives. This is sometimes due to sheer geography where the aged or sick person lives nearer to one set of relatives than to another. In addition, some relatives or friends may be better suited to dealing with the realities of sickness, age and dying than are others. There are some people who do not have the temperament to be care givers for those they love dearly, because they cannot bear to see a parent decay and succumb to age and death, particularly if the process is prolonged.

Those who are elderly, sick and in need often attempt to show their gratitude for the care that they are being given through bequests in their will. It seems only fair that the relative who is actually caring for their loved one should be rewarded by the one who is being cared for. However, there is the potential that the other heirs want an equal share of the bequest regardless of who took care of whom in the final days of a person’s life. Sometimes, for no other reason than that they want to feel that they were loved equally and view an equal share of the will as a demonstration of that.

When this happens, a common means of contesting a will is employed that involves a claim of undue influence. This claim is essentially grounded in the idea that a relative exercised an extreme amount of coercive ability with respect to the deceased. It must be true that the person who is claimed to have undue influence also received an ‘undue benefit.’ Undue Influence is usually combined with a claim of lack of capacity in one form or the other. The less forceful the waning personality of the deceased becomes in the eyes of the courts, the easier it is to estab Read the rest of this entry »

Wills and trusts have an interesting history in a culture as heavily influenced by British common law as our own. The bequests of wills have been the pole star around which a great deal of mystery fiction has been written where furtive and anxious relatives wait around a long imposing table to hear what is to become of the family fortune and thus; what is to become of them. As usual, fiction and the media give one side of what something has been or is, while the other side of the tale exists behind the scenes or on an obscure back page of a newspaper.

What is not often shown about a will is that it is contested. Perhaps this is because the craving for legal courtroom drama is a relatively new phenomenon, and perhaps because the way the family members behave toward one another over large sums of money is too violent even for television. Wills are contested in long bitter rivalries that often leave no member of the family unscathed. Often there are two opposing camps and each relative must decide which “side” they are going to be on. It is refreshing when the sides earnestly agree that they each wish to bring about what they believe the deceased would have wanted, but it is more often the case in which that is merely the incantation recited to get what each opposing camp thinks is their due.

One means of opposing a will is to suggest that the person making the will was crazy when they made it. That is why even most lay people begin their will with the phrase, “I (so and so) being of sound mind and body….” This legal doctrine is not unique to wills, but affects the right to enter into contracts and agreements of all sorts. In the context of wills, this is called capacity.

Capacity can be broken down into two elements — first, the will maker must not be mentally deficient. For the most part this means that the will maker must underst Read the rest of this entry »