Why Estate Planning Can’t Wait

Transcript

good afternoon everyone this is stephanie garces donat owner of garces law thank you for tuning in to the pink mic legal confessions we have a good topic this week kind of similar to the last week's episode but a little bit more in depth i really hope you guys learn a little bit more today about um the difficulties that we talk about um when we're talking about our us adults some of our parents some of the difficulties they face as they're aging and you know things start to change and they don't have any basic estate plan in order what happens to them why is it critical and really in the event your parents don't have anything why they should consider it especially when they can't take care of themselves which unfortunately some happens to some of us um at some point in our lives but um i want to thank everyone for watching today as you know um i'm stephanie garces donat the owner of garces law firm where we help parents secure their legacy and actually now we're helping adult children secure their legacy by helping their parents as well so always here to help um like i mentioned today's topic i'm going to be talking about what happens when the roles of us as children or you know adult children changes into having to be sort of like parents to our own parents uh this does happen sometimes and sometimes people don't know what to do so that's what we're going to talk about today now most people will go through a period in their in their life where they need to care for their parents they don't really know where to turn and during this time the planning and the documents need to be put in place are really critical to the outcome and to your goals um you obviously have to do this while you're able to do it and mom and dad are still well and we'll talk about that in detail but you certainly don't want to wait on these things it makes a huge difference when you have someone helping you especially an attorney like myself who does this every day and really knows the ins and outs of the law what's required to to do the next thing and so these things really do matter so i really hope you learned something today uh keep in mind that if no planning is done in general there are consequences for you and your family and it can make life incredibly difficult so we want to avoid avoid all that so as i mentioned um today's topic was actually requested by some audience members whose parents have not adequately planned for um for a unforeseen incident for example um if they lose capacity or if they have a impairment that happened overnight um also uh we talk a lot about people that haven't planned for retirement i am no financial advisor but this does matter uh you know as far as having estate planning documents in order for your finances so some are now facing health issues as you know we are in the middle of a pandemic um of all times this is so important so i really hope that um you know people understand that there is help um us children of of parent with our parents have to sort of decide things and and make moves um while we can um and always trying to make sure that we're taking care of our family and so sometimes that responsibility gets shifted at some point so uh sometimes we have to do things like speak to doctors or perhaps we have to get involved with the property that our parents own uh maybe it's more than one property or their cars or their assets their checking accounts sometimes people will have uh money tied up in different types of accounts and so we end up having to make decisions for our parents when something happens so situations like these are all too common and can happen very unexpectedly so today just to give you kind of the scenarios we're going to run through we're going to talk about what a power of attorney is for health care what do you need to be able to speak to doctors make medical decisions on behalf of your family members we're also going to talk about durable power of attorneys for financial um that is basically separate it's a separate type of power of attorney document that you want to hear about today and also uh we're going to cover living wills what's the difference between a will and a living will uh for aging parents or even for yourself i mean these things are are not something that we need to put off personally but sometimes our parents don't have it so i know that's focus of today so i wanted to mention that but another thing that pops up by the way is a transfer of property super super common um if parents have not saved enough for retirement um what happens to the to the property um if they want to transfer the assets to someone else or perhaps they want to prevent those assets from being seized a lot of times people will have questions about like medicare yeah or perhaps they're in a retirement home what happens to the property then those things do matter there's so many things we can talk about for that but those those are some of the topics that we get asked about and lastly we're going to talk about how do you speak to your parent about getting these documents in order especially when they're resistant they're what's considered old school they say oh i don't need that that's a waste or we'll get it online and we'll talk about the online thing because people love asking me about that and i love talking about it so i'll tell you the difference between getting something online and getting something from attorney that actually is licensed to practice law in the state that you live in um so all of that stuff matters and we're going to jump right in so just to recap again like i said my name is attorney stephanie garces donat i'm the owner of garces law in arlington heights uh we help parents secure their legacy and plan for life's transitions including protecting your children and something happens to you and this also includes all children by the way so like i said today we're talking about why estate planning cannot wait i get calls all the time of people that say i really really want to do my estate plan and then we go through the options and they want to say okay well i'm going to do it next year and i'm going to tell you why you don't have to wait and you shouldn't wait so we'll talk about that today like i always mention i wanted to tune in um really quick and say last week we had a really good episode about um what are the top 10 questions about estate planning that i get and you can check my answers on our youtube channel or facebook live that's on my page on my facebook page feel free to check that out uh it's free it's free it's all in it's all really important information um and certainly check it out if you haven't haven't already so we welcome you to join us here on tuesdays at one o'clock to discuss some of the questions you guys have about legal stuff estate planning uh we also talked about some other things and i'm always open to hearing what the audience has to say so we're gonna dive right in one of the questions that we get a lot is what happens if the state gets involved because we didn't get a power of its turning now this is a loaded question because when we talk about the state we're really talking about the preceding um a judge usually or a court has to get involved to appoint what's called a guardian to take over another person who's 18 years or older and cannot make basic decisions for themselves and this includes they can't manage their property their finances perhaps they're having um issues mentally physically uh this really can be a lot of things but really when we're talking about um capacity that is a uh term in the legal world or it's a i should say the medical world not the legal world we use it in legal too but the medical world capacity really includes someone being able to uh make decisions and um especially about their health care that's a big one so when we talk about impairments and what are things that people would want to have um in place powers of attorney are very important um really the reason is it won't dive into a little bit later is it actually set something up so that someone can actually step into your shoes and help you make decisions when you can no longer make them yourself now when they talked about someone who maybe lacks capacity this is someone that maybe has a mental illness someone who has a developmental disability it could be physical impairment and the list goes on so it could be a number of things but that's just something to keep in mind so uh what happens if the if the court gets involved well you have to actually open a proceeding and you do have to hire an attorney to help you with that so that is not something that um you want to try to do you want to avoid it if you can but obviously people end up there so it's definitely something that people will want to i try to avoid so we'll talk about how to avoid going to court and certain things um hopefully that is something that you're interested in so you can keep watching um another question that i get is why is the probate process so expensive this is a very important question because people will sometimes ask why is it that probate is where you end up and why is it so pricey well besides the fact that this is a system that's really designed to ensure that um the estate is taken care of that the right people get the right things from the estate usually you end up there because there's either no estate planning in place in general and you know someone could have only the house and that's their biggest asset and they could still end up in probate the als the alternative is true where someone could also have many many properties maybe one property in a lot of assets and they don't have any sort of estate planning documents to transfer those those um assets that actually does impact your likelihood of going to probate the reason it's expensive is because you know there's a lot involved uh usually the court in itself um charges you to go to probate the circle court costs of course you have to pay the attorneys which we also are going to charge for our time there's also um other things for example um we talk a lot about uh probate and the purpose of it well it's also designed to allow creditors to file a claim so sometimes the person is passed away owes money to somebody um this could be any creditor let's just say it's a credit card credit card company files a claim they say you know what uncle sam had a claim with us because he took out a 20 000 credit line and basically he never paid us because he passed away so a creditor which is the credit card company they actually do get to go to court and see if they could get paid before the heirs get paid and so this really um is a safeguard that protects creditors but also future um you know errors involved in the in the in the process but what the point is is that there's a lot of court filings there's code oversight there's um a lot of notices and filings um notifications that have to go out there's also um a bond um i haven't talked too much about this but sometimes a bond is required which is basically required when someone doesn't have a will in place and passes away it has to go to probate uh at minimum at minimum it's at least a thousand dollars so it could be as much as you know triple that um 300 000 something crazy i mean it really is just depends on the estate but the point i'm trying to make is that it's expensive because there's just a lot involved and of course it takes a long time so really between court costs and fees and attorneys fees and everything in between it gets expensive you also have to consider two and probate sometimes the heirs are not in agreement there's a number of family members that'll call us saying they are in a fight with their sibling because of the estate and they want to get this and mom was going to leave me that and so that does arise and those disputes do lead to more expensive probate estates so just something to keep in mind why probate is so expensive now how can i avoid probate and state involvement now that i've sort of told you about how expensive it is and time consuming it is the most basic way to avoid probate or having your family even have to go there is to get estate planning documents in order i repeat get your estate planning documents in order some viewers will ask me all the time you know how quickly can i do this when should i do it i'm single i don't have kids um should i be should i be putting something in order absolutely it doesn't matter if you have not a lot or an abundance of assets the reason you want to put something in order is because if something happens to you your family and your loved ones who outlive you would not have to go into probate as you know it's expensive it's time consuming it's not somewhere that is where anybody really intends to be but it's certainly necessary for some individuals that don't have that in order so estate planning documents and getting the proper attorney to kind of guide you through the process is really the way to avoid probate now if you download documents online i know questions um like that will come in can i just download them online can i just pay a service to come to my house to basically give me the documents and i just sign or maybe i do it a la carte and i you know buy it online and then i get them done myself well of course you could do that if you were to google even before this video i had actually googled online forms and there are so many out there now i'm not telling you that it's not possible but what i'm telling you is that it's definitely not customized to your needs and that is really the difference um between just doing it online and going with an attorney so something to keep in mind because you don't necessarily want to be doing things on your own because again there are just so many implications that come when you don't get the proper documents set up and trust me when i tell you i know people are on a budget i know that people want to uh save and this is something that you know us and our firm we can certainly help you with with payments we have different alternatives of payments uh it's very feasible so don't ever feel like it isn't if you have questions about that you can always call and text and we'll talk you through some of the options that we offer but like i said getting it online yes you might save the money you might save uh the trip to the attorney's office but it's not customized and it doesn't necessarily work because you could really run into an issue where the documents are not recognized meaning they're not valid so these are things that you don't want to put yourself in or your family in all because you decided to just get them online also keep in mind some of these online platforms do not customize to the state so you might download something online that you found just googling but to make it legal and valid every state is different so there are proper requirements illinois requirements to make sure that if something does happen to you that well is recognized it's valid and it holds in court or just upholds in general and so these are the reasons why downloading them and doing your free online forms or even at minimal cost is not worth it because you will end up paying for it at the end and so will your family unfortunately so just something to keep in mind but i do get a lot of questions about that now another thing that um is is asked often is um hipaa hipaa release forms are these the same as healthcare power of attorneys while they're very different documents although the one thing they have in common is they have to do with medical records and decisions but in fact they're very different so for example the hipaa authorization is really a consent form we actually prepare these for our clients and it would allow um a patient to have their records released to the person that they've chosen typically hipaa it's a privacy rule it's a law that says no one can have their medical records disclosed without consent so the hip authorization is something that we offer it's super important for an estate plan to have it because if you don't have it you actually don't have the ability to actually have someone who's you appointed to have access to your records in the event you can't consent to it while you're incapacitated or unable to make your decisions and these are really powerful documents because the person that doesn't have it well hipaa would forbid anyone from seeing your records and so that really is uh very different than the power of attorney for health care the power of attorney for health care is a little bit a little bit different in that it actually appoints someone to make decisions on your behalf so that means if you became incapacitated if you were in life support who is the person making medical decisions on your behalf this person steps into your shoes and basically makes the medical decisions for you so typically physicians hospitals will want to see a legal power of attorney for health care if there's anyone wife kids anyone in your family that would actually make decisions for you if you cannot make them yourselves for your medical um affairs and that is really the stark difference between a power of attorney for health care and hipaa authorization now there are a couple other questions i get about that kind of going in more into the weeds here is what is the difference between a healthcare power of attorney and a healthcare directive again a little bit more similar but still very different you already heard that the healthcare power of attorney gives authority to another person to really act on your behalf for any health matters medical decisions this person has a lot of power and they actually need to have capacity themselves so the person that you choose has to be someone you trust has to be someone who's able to actually be present and um really just make important decisions for you so if you're ever considering doing that you have to do it while you're living of course you have to have capacity and we'll talk about a little bit more about that later but the the point is is that you certainly want to pick somebody to make decisions on your behalf because everyone should have one everyone 18 or older should have one these are very important documents because again when the time comes god forbid there were something to happen you actually have the proper documentation to protect you for someone to make decisions for you and it's someone that you chose so that is kind of the reason why the power of attorney is something that a lot of people consider and we usually make it part of your standard estate plan if you don't have one in order and of course if you're interested we do offer those all by themselves if you already have an estate plan and want to supplement or if you have a power of attorney and you want to amend it or change the person that you've picked we can help you do that as well now i told you i would tell you what the directive means while the healthcare directive actually the word directive is basically directing somebody um someone that you've chosen to basically make decisions about whether you would want to be kept alive whether that's by artificial means or if you are um terminally ill or permanently incapacitated whether or not you would allow other type of treatment to keep you alive um but wouldn't cure you these are what healthcare directives are the best basically designates someone to make those decisions if you cannot so it's a little bit more specific and it's a little bit more uh serious but it basically steers the person that you've picked in the direction that you actually wanted if you were in that position so these are very important documents as well because it gives power to you if you were incapacitated because you've already chosen somebody and you've given them instructions on what you want and so this sort of thing is very important because it actually lets someone know hey when i was conscious and i was making these decisions this is what i really wanted and so that's what a health care directive does very important very necessary to have it in the estate plan now sometimes we have a question that is actually pretty concerning for some people because they don't know what they should do about their parent sometimes people will ask what should i do if i first suspect my parent or relative is not being truthful about their medical condition or perhaps i suspect that something is wrong with them medically now i know we all have parents that maybe don't want to tell us what the truth is because they want to protect us that makes sense plenty of parents do that but let's just say you're wondering what can i do what are my options well you can always get a medical evaluation by a licensed physician many people will think about this as a you know thing that wow i don't know if if mama marina would like that but sometimes it's necessary especially if you aren't sure keep in mind that when you enter into estate planning documents the person your parent who's going to be signing the documents has to be of sound mind which in the legal world means they can make decisions for themselves they're competent they understand they know how to enter into these documents and they have capacity so i throw this word around a lot but really that is the medical term for it and that is what we strive for because we want to make sure that the person that is working with us is fully aware that we represent them they understand what we're doing and they are cognizant and can recognize and have competency in the documents that they're signing and that they know the decisions they're making are ones of their own so medical evaluations are very important a formal assessment can be done to evaluate capacity and sometimes even a consultation with a psychiatrist is also something that people do that is not unheard of in some cases is necessary so very helpful to try to think about these things as options and they're always available to you if you are in a position where you think that would benefit your parent now if you're concerned about your parents well-being especially their mental health if it's failing um you can always talk to your local physician if you don't have one you can certainly look um you know with your insurance sometimes there's even places that take uh people without insurance at like a fixed fee so there's different options for people that may or may not have the means to go to the doctor or perhaps they're looking for something a little more um cost efficient so just keep that in mind but kind of going into the one of the questions i get a lot is what are the most important documents to have in my estate plan now i've mentioned a ton of them because there are so many documents that you can add but at the very least to help your parents one of the things you should certainly consider is as i mentioned already the powers of attorney for health care the powers of attorney for financial the financial power of attorney by the way that does allow the person that your parent has chosen whether it's you or your sibling or someone else to really make financial decisions for them in case they can't make themselves a living will very important for the reasons i mentioned you get to actually direct in how you want to be treated in the event you are life support or in a position where you are not going to recover that gives direction to the person you've chosen to make sure that they know what you wanted the hip authorization is also very important for the reasons i mentioned earlier you certainly want to have that in order to make sure that the person that you've chosen to make mental medical decisions has access to those records and can get them if they needed them another thing that's really important is just a will a basic will and i say basic very lightly because i think everyone no matter your income your background what you have or don't have children or no children should always consider a will because at the very least it leaves written instructions in how you wanted your asset splits who is going to be in charge of your affairs if something happens to you there are so many reasons why will is really really important now there are a couple of documents too i've talked a lot about trust before those are necessary for people of a certain asset category but i would say you know the pers the person that you're thinking of or yourself if you at least own real estate that's over a hundred thousand or you yourself have in savings in your house is over a hundred thousand then yes a trust could be a good option for your parent or for yourself parents especially most of them at this point in their lives either have assets or retirements to protect so a trust might be a good option in the alternative if they are not qualified to have something like that then we scale it back and we still get an estate plan an order perhaps a will based estate plan that would actually cover the assets that they have in place so nonetheless there are so many important documents that your parents should have in order and you should never be afraid to call us to ask about what you think is is something that they would want and remember we always customize to the client so everyone is different we always make sure that the documents that we use our customized to the individual themselves now i think that's all the questions i have but i don't know if off the top of my head i could think about something else that people ask you know one of the one of the main things that someone mentioned to me earlier was um how do i get my mom or dad to sort of make an appointment with you what is the process that is a really great question i love answering this because it kind of gives me an opportunity to show how how we do things here obviously you've seen it on the screen we are available for any free consultations 30 minutes with myself you can text or you can call to book it you can also go on my website we do have people available to take your take your questions or set up a meeting and we do that at your convenience you can do it by coming in person if you're comfortable with that we do wear masks i have my mask right here um if you're not comfortable with that or mom and dad cannot come to the office uh for personal reasons we can also do videos virtually um or meetings virtually so google meets uh zoom nowadays i think everyone is kind of used to that so we do offer those options as well and really the process and the goal during the consultations for me to understand what you're looking to do how many assets you have and what we can do to actually customize it based off your needs sometimes people will come and say well i think i need this and i might agree with that but we may want to supplement it with more because you may actually have more than you think or perhaps there's nothing to protect it so the process is actually not super complicated but it does require us to sit down and examine your situation so that we can make sure the documents are tailored to you and then once the documents are ready and we've worked together to make sure that it's the proper estate plan for you we basically have you come and sign here at the office we have the witnesses we have the notaries we have everything that you need to finalize the documents and that really is the final step now there's a couple other things that we tend to check in on after we make the estate plan which is a conversation for another day but what it really is is we want to make sure that all the assets are transferred into the trust and that's a whole another process in itself it's also a service that we offer and we make sure to make that customizable to you as well so that really is the process for working with us and i do welcome the opportunity to be able to work with you and your family so i want to thank all of the viewers today for tuning in to pink mic legal confessions it's always an honor to be able to use my platform to inform all of you about what we do and how we can help and feel free to reach out to me personally or my staff to make sure we can actually set something up for you and your family in the event you don't have anything or looking to update it we do both of those so i encourage you to meet us here on tuesdays at one o'clock to see what else we're talking about we have some interesting topics coming up and you will want to stay tuned so thank you again for your time