Before you read the rest of this post I want you to make me a promise.
Promise me that immediately after you finish your research about Power of Attorney (POA), you will create a plan to get one for your loved one and for yourself.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to get these affairs in order before it is too late. Life comes at you fast and you do NOT want to be without a POA once your loved one (LO) is already unable to decide for themselves.
It took me a long time to actually get my parents to a lawyer. You know how life gets…
We kept putting it off and it was difficult to find a good attorney that wasn’t going to charge an arm and a leg. This was about 2 years after my mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and if I had waited even a month longer, it would have been too late. She regressed so quickly and we never saw it coming.
Let me tell you what happens if you do not get a POA while your LO is still competent.
You will have to seek guardianship through the state. This is a long, arduous process and it will be difficult for you to care for your LO while you are waiting for it to be completed.
Keep your promise to me and save yourself the headache.
A Power of Attorney is a legal document that assigns an individual to make decisions for another individual. You can create a general POA, which can have a designated timeframe, or you can create a durable POA, which will keep it active forever.
Most POA documents will indicate when they take effect. For my parents, it is only active once they are deemed mentally incompetent to make their own decisions.
There is a medical POA which handles all of your medical decisions and a financial POA which handles all of your financial decisions.
I would HIGHLY recommend designating one person for both and then having a secondary in case the primary individual is unable to decide, for whatever reason.
I would also recommend contacting several lawyers for quotes. The first quote we got, just to draft a simple medical and financial POA for 2 people, was $4,000! I knew that was overpriced.
We ended up paying around $1,500 and this was in 2017.
Do you absolutely need a lawyer? No, you can draft your own POA using templates, just make sure it is notarized and detailed. For us, we wanted it done right so we were willing to pay.
I know that this is a difficult conversation to have with your parents, but try to help them understand that you genuinely have their best interests at heart. You’ll want to discuss what their preferences are. Do they want to be put on a vent? Do they want to die with dignity? Do they want to sell the house to pay for memory care or would they rather have a live in caregiver? I made a list for my parents and we talked about all of their options. The one phrase I kept repeating to them was “Tell me so I can take care of you the way that you want.”
If you have siblings you’ll want to include them in the conversation too. It will be difficult for your parents to choose one person, but ultimately it is their life and their choice. Discussing these matters early will prevent future family drama. It lays everything out on the table.
My dad initially had concerns that I was going to stiff him because he is a very suspicious old school Polish man. (Poles tend to be suspicious of everyone, from my experience, haha). But now that we are living with him, remodeled his whole kitchen, buy him tacos and Dunkin Donuts whenever we go out, and help take care of mom, he says he has grown to trust us.
He has expressed many times how grateful he is that I took care of everything for my mom before she declined.
Having a POA in place now has made the process of being a caregiver a little easier than it would have been otherwise. For example, my mom had an IRA that wouldn’t release her funds to my dad without her signature and I was easily able to get it for him by showing them a copy of the POA.
I hope this will encourage you to get your affairs in order! It is something that everyone should do for their family. Let me know if you have any additional questions or how I can make this post better in the comments. Take care of yourself, you beautiful human.
