As Wife likes to say, “Life is what happens when you make plans.” Even if you don’t make plans, life will happen. All you can do is try to prepare yourself, and hopefully, you’ll be ready for the next challenge Life throws at you.
Daddies and Mommies are busy. We have our regular jobs, and then there’s the cooking, shopping, getting to practices, games, school plays, and doctor’s appointments. Parenting comes with a lot of responsibilities. We want to take care of our families.
Taking care of the kids can take on a lot of different meanings. There are the obvious tasks: meals, health, clean clothes. As our kids get older, though, we are taking care of them in different ways.
Taking Care of Your Family
We want to take care of our families, especially our children. You can only do so much for your own Miracles of Christ, but whatever it is you’re trying to do for them, you want to make sure it’s done right.
Part of making sure things are done right includes ensuring your family is taken care of after you leave this mortal realm. You may have this under control already. Some of the more prepared Daddies and Mommies have things taken care of. Important things like wills, deeds, powers of attorney, and trusts are just some of the things you should have when it comes to making sure your final wishes are honored and your loved ones are getting the assets you’ve worked hard to attain and keep while you were on this planet.
This can seem like a daunting task to some. It’s not always easy making sure things are in working order. However, this isn’t something that needs to be done all at once. If you take these tasks on one at a time, these problems will solve themselves. As I once heard someone say, if you take care of the little things, the big things will fall into place.
The Estate Planning Handbook for Beginners
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, the title is long, and the subject matter is dry, but what’s inside is priceless information that will help you and your family.
Patrick Herring is someone who knows about getting things taken care of. Patrick has spent over twenty years helping clients deal with the pitfalls and hurdles of making sure money and other assets make it safely to the next generation. He’s a lawyer, but believe me, I’ve met some lawyers who are decent people.
Patrick has written “The Estate Planning Handbook for Beginners: A Plain-English Guide to Protecting your Family and Planning Ahead with Confidence”. Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way, the title is long, and the subject matter is dry, but what’s inside is priceless information that will help you and your family. It’s bad enough when emergencies or surprise losses in the family occur but making it worse is when there is no contingency plan, or there was a plan, but you don’t know where instructions and final wishes are stored.
Estate planning doesn’t begin with mastering every legal detail. It begins with a few clear decisions.
There could be other problems when it comes to managing your final wishes or what to do in case of an emergency. Relationship dynamics can change. Relatives can have a falling out with each other. Couples can get divorces. People can remarry. Relatives you were prepared to trust with your life’s work or your children could die before you. Ther are many things that can happen as you get through this thing called life. It’s not enough to file documents and forget about it. You need to have periodic reviews of everything to make sure everything is in working order and things can be as turn-key as they can possibly be when an event happens and paperwork needs to kick in.
This includes making sure everything lines up. If one form says something, but another form says something completely different, it could cause complications when your family is trying to handle everything. Worse, it could also cause some conflict between family members if there are to different sets of instructions regarding the same episode.
A Great Plan. Does your Family Know?
The question isn’t how many documents are in the folder. The question is whether the documents, the asset setup, and the decisions behind them all tell the same story.
In addition to making sure everything is in place, it’s important to make sure you have communicated those wishes to the proper parties. If you want someone to take care of your children should something happen to you, make sure those people they are the chosen guardians. It’s bad enough trying to deal with a family emergency without finding out you’ve been charged with caring for little ones.
Having old documents isn’t the same as having the right documents.
You also need to let people know where things are stored. It’s important to know what needs to happen in case of such emergencies. When you are explaining your final wishes to relatives, make sure they know where things can be accessed when it’s time. This will make things easier for your next of kin and also for yourself.
It’s not easy when you need to take care of your family, but having an updated plan that everyone is aware of can make it a little easier when the family is blindsided with news of an illness that leaves a loved one incapacitated. If everyone knows the relative’s wishes for such an event, it won’t make it less painful, but it will make it easier to deal with shout the moment arise.
Dealing with these things isn’t fun. Talking about these things isn’t pleasant, but if you can make things a little easier for your family when a crisis emerges, take comfort in knowing you are helping them make a difficult time a little easier. Patrick wants to help you alleviate these difficulties. His book can do just that.
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