Why You NEED to Have a Power of Attorney

Dave and Julia discuss why having a power of attorney may matter even more than a will.

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I would argue wills are incredibly important. You’ve gotta have a will. I say that almost every podcast, but powers of attorney are just as important. Maybe more so now that I’m getting old. A lot of my friends are even a little bit older than I am. Hard to believe. Oh my gosh, this is jumping up and getting people over and over again. The carelessness on this front is kind of wacky Thoughts?

A lot of people believe that their spouse automatically has the right to take over their financial situation. They do not. So if you experience incapacity and you are joint on the house with your spouse and your spouse is oh, I need to put you in a home for care. I need to sell the house to do that, it’s incredibly difficult to make that happen if they haven’t been appointed under your power of attorney.

On top of that, there’s just every aspect of it. So the individual that I’m now acting as executor for, I was also his power of attorney and he was in the hospital. He’s actually not incapable, but he wasn’t capable of paying bills, picking up his mail, getting all of these pieces done. Somebody has to do that.

And with power of attorney, I could do that. Otherwise, everybody else that these financial institutions and the post office that I’m walking into are like, who’s this lady that she doesn’t look like a Henry. This isn’t gonna work out. Like there we just, the basics of the ability to keep your lights on in your house and collect your mail, it’s so important.

So we need that. Most of us are going to experience the need for that kind of help, whether we have mental or physical incapacity in our lives before we die, and we don’t have to be old to experience it.

I’ve had clients who have had major head trauma in their thirties who are not able to take care of their own financial situation and didn’t have power of attorney in place.

And so then we have to apply to the courts. We have to have them declared mentally incapable, which on its own is actually really hard to do and a lot of people aren’t willing to do it.

And very time consuming.

Oh, and so expensive.

Like you’re looking at 10 grand easy.

Yeah, for sure. You know what, I love these answers because they’re all perfectly consistent with what I think.

So we have, yeah, this is good. Keep, keep going, keep going. You’re on a roll.