The process of estate planning should ideally be viewed from a comprehensive perspective. There is more to a well constructed estate plan than the creation of a last will or a trust to facilitate postmortem asset transfers.
While it is true that you have to address things that will happen after you are gone when you plan your estate, you should also consider the period of time that will precede your passing. Though this is certainly not a very pleasant prospect to consider, you may become unable to communicate health care decisions toward the end of your life. To account for this, you could execute legal documents called advance directives for health care.
Life Support
During our modern era, medical professionals can utilize techniques to keep people alive in many cases, even terminal patients who are not going to recover. You may or may not want these measures to be implemented if you are ever in this position. To state your life support preferences, you can create an advance directive called a living will.
When you have a living will in place, your own wishes will be carried out if you ever become unable to communicate, and your family members will know exactly how you feel, so there will be no disagreements among them.
Empowering a Representative
A living will is an advance directive for health care that addresses life-support exclusively, but other types of medical decision-making may become necessary. To name a representative to act on your behalf from a health care perspective in the event of your incapacitation, you could execute an advance directive for health care called a health care proxy. These documents are sometimes called durable powers of attorney for health care.
Free Special Report
Our firm has prepared an in-depth special report that you can download free of charge if you would like to obtain more detailed information about advance directives and incapacity planning. We have looked at the health care portion of the equation in this blog post, but there are also financial matters that you can address when you devise your incapacity plan.
To get your copy of the free special report, visit this page and follow the simple instructions: Incapacity Planning Report.
Learn More at Forbes.com
We do everything possible to circulate sound information about important estate planning and elder law topics. You can visit this blog on a regular basis, and we update it often so that you can always build on your knowledge.
Plus, in addition to the information that that we publish here on our own website, we also contribute a steady stream of estate planning and elder law content on our Forbes.com page. To access our articles, click the following link: Forbes Contributor Mark Eghrari.
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