Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – What Does an Agent Under a Medical Power of Attorney Do?
Informed consent in medicine is an ethical and legal requirement for treatment. It is one of the core principles of the American Medical Association and ensures that patients can ask questions and obtain information about a treatment or procedure and explicitly consent to it.
There are recognized exceptions to...
Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – Helping Clients with Their Financial Decisions
Although we may not always recognize it, financial decisions and tasks are a part of our everyday lives. They range from daily spending habits to more complex financial planning and include everything from checking account balances and paying bills to updating insurance and signing contracts to making investments and retirement planning.
Incapacity Planning Information Your Clients Need to Know – Why Your Clients Need to Worry About Incapacity Planning
Death is the elephant in the room when it comes to talking about estate planning with clients. To avoid causing undue distress, we often edge around it, referring to heirs and beneficiaries or using terms like pass away or pass on.
This is something of a professional courtesy. Clients...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Whom Do You Trust to Make Your Medical Decisions?
It might be a stretch to say that if you have your health, you have everything. However, to some people, decisions about their health are arguably more personal in nature and more important to their overall well-being than financial decisions.
This leads to the question of who will step...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Whom Do You Trust to Make Your Financial Decisions?
You wake up and check your investments over a cup of coffee. That tech stock you have been eyeing continues to trend upward, so you log in to your online brokerage account and buy some shares.
Later in the day, you get a notice that your mortgage payment has...
Incapacity Planning: The Other Part of Estate Planning – Why You Need to Worry About Incapacity Planning
Death is the elephant in the room when we talk about estate planning. We often use phrases like pass away and pass on to make our meetings feel more comfortable and avoid being overly macabre, but the not-so-subtle subtext of an estate plan is death’s inevitability.
If death is...
When a Client’s Parent Is Evacuated: What Every Advisor Should Know
The decision to place a parent in a nursing home or assisted living facility is rarely simple. It can feel even more fraught in hindsight when something goes wrong.
Careful research and frequent check-ins can help a client keep their loved one safe and secure in their new residence,...
What Your Clients Have Not Done with Their Documents—and How to Bring It Up
Clients rarely think of document access as a vulnerability. The plan is in place, the paperwork is signed, and the folder or binder containing that paperwork is somewhere at home. But a disaster does not wait for someone to remember where “somewhere” is. When a client is displaced, incapacitated, or unreachable, a...
Emergency Preparedness When Your Parent Is in a Nursing Home
The decision to place a parent in a nursing home or assisted living facility is rarely simple. It can feel even more fraught in hindsight when something goes wrong.
Careful research and frequent check-ins can help keep a parent safe and secure in their new residence, as can preparing...
How to Protect Your Legal Documents in a Natural Disaster
Legal documents can feel abstract when nobody immediately needs them or you have never used them, in much the same way that the risk of a wildfire, hurricane, or other emergency can feel remote until you experience one firsthand.
Suddenly, the stakes are real, a plan is put to...