Estate Planning In A Panic Is Better Than Not Estate Planning At All
It’s after midnight, and the house is quiet. Even though every sound your children make when they are awake drives you up the wall, their innocent, expressionless faces and the sound of their deep breaths when they are asleep fill you with calm. At least, they usually do. Tonight, you are acutely aware of your mortality. Maybe you made the mistake of scrolling through news headlines and saw that a celebrity close to your age recently died. Perhaps, in a fit of revenge bedtime procrastination after yet another day of all work and no play, you started Googling the names of your professors from college and found nothing but obituaries. Maybe, as you were scrambling to finish the tasks that can’t wait until tomorrow, you took comfort in the fact that, even though you live paycheck to paycheck, you provide financial and emotional support for your family, and they would be in a much worse position without you, and that led you to the thought that, much like your professors and your celebrity peers, you will eventually go the way of all flesh. You decide to get started on your estate plan, or else you won’t be able to sleep, but you need to get at least a little bit of sleep. It’s time to jot down a bare bones estate plan so that, in the morning, you can wake up feeling refreshed and contact a Tampa estate planning lawyer.
What to Do Between Now and When the Estate Planning Lawyer’s Office Opens
For the next hour, it’s you, Google, and Microsoft Word making a quick and dirty first draft of your estate plan, which you can later review with an estate planning attorney by the light of day. The first thing to do is to write a rough draft of your will. Whether you write it is a bullet list in a Word document or download a template, it should include the following provisions:
- The name of a guardian and a successor guardian for your children in the event that you and your spouse both die when your children are minors
- Instructions about the final disposition of your remains, such as where you want to be buried or who should get possession of your ashes
- Information about how the personal representative should find your financial details or gain access to your devices
- The name of the person who should assume responsibility for your pets in the event of your death
All of this is assuming that you do not own much valuable property. The next step is to write a medical advance directive containing your wishes about your medical care and designating the person who should speak on your behalf about medical decisions if you become too ill to speak for yourself. Then you should email yourself some links to life insurance policies and long-term care insurance policies and then close up your computer and go to bed, knowing that you have something to start with when you meet with an estate planning lawyer.
Contact David Toback About Your Bare Bones Estate Plan
A Central Florida estate planning lawyer can help you turn your vague ideas into a workable estate plan. Contact David Toback in Tampa, Florida to set up a consultation.
Source:
fhcp.com/documents/forms/Advanced-Directives-Designation-of-Health-Care-Surrogate.pdf
