Plan Today to Help Protect Your Future: The Importance of Estate Planning

If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you know the level of meticulous detail involved. Each decision – the caterer, photographer, music, attire, venue, flowers – requires careful thought. Hopefully, putting everything in place in advance means when the big day comes, everyone can relax, enjoy, and celebrate together.

Compare this degree of planning to your estate planning. Understandably, many of us are much more reluctant to plan for our future needs. Unlike the joy of planning a wedding, estate planning brings with it thoughts of impending frailty and our mortality. Yet if we plan so carefully for a single-day event, how much more should we prioritize planning for our senior years and beyond?

Sean Byrne, Managing Partner of the elder law firm Bach, Jacobs and Byrne, shares some guidance to help you better understand what is involved with estate planning.

Estate Planning 101

The first step is to locate an attorney who specializes in elder law. Many larger, jack-of-all-trades firms don’t practice elder law. A smaller, specialized firm is better equipped to handle the particular nuances of elder law.

Your elder law attorney should begin by finding out what your existing long-term care plan is. If you were to need someone to assist you with financial matters and health care, what would you want that to look like? This could mean staying at home as long as possible with home care assistance, moving in with adult children, or transferring to a senior living community or facility, for instance.

Secondly, the elder law attorney will help you determine how to pay for future care needs. There are typically three means of covering the cost for senior care:

• Out of pocket
• Long-term care insurance
• Medicaid

The attorney will help protect the assets you have so they’re not consumed by long-term care costs.

Estate Planning Documentation

In this online age, people are increasingly turning to the internet for everything from tuna casserole recipes to medical advice. It may seem easy enough to download and fill out legal documents, but this is never advised. Lawyers have gone to law school to learn to do this right, and it’s very easy to make mistakes, which can be costly.

The power of attorney in particular trips a lot of people up. We have rights as American citizens to sign our own contracts, cash our own checks, deposit and withdraw money. These rights can be exercised but also shared with another person. Think through who you truly trust to step in and make decisions for you if you are unable to make them for yourself.

The biggest mistake people make in estate planning, however, is simply putting it off. Think of estate planning in the same way you might think about taking out a life insurance policy. You do it because it’s the responsible thing to do to make things easier for your family. These are tough, emotionally-charged conversations to have, but it’s important to have them, and proactive planning makes is easier and more comfortable for everyone.

For more helpful resources related to aging and elder care, give us a call at 941-929-1966. Right At Home, Sarasota senior care provider for the surrounding areas, is here to help.