Do You Know What 4 Documents You Need if You're Temporarily Incapacitated?

Do you know what four Estate Planning documents everyone needs if you were to be temporarily incapacitated? Attorney Justin Randall made an appearance on  WFRV Local 5  to discuss the importance of having these documents in order now to avoid complicating a potential health event later.

Lisa Malak
Welcome back, everybody. If you were to become temporarily incapacitated. Do your loved ones have the right to act on your behalf?

Millaine Wells
Attorney Justin Randall from Hooper Law Office is joining us to discuss Powers of Attorney and the importance of having the right people and, of course, documents in place. Good morning to you, Justin.

Justin Randall
Good morning.

Millaine Wells
Let's talk about first the documents when it comes to what we need to have in place and in order for someone to act on our behalf.

Justin Randall
Yeah. So in our office, we refer to these documents as disability documents or documents that you would use during an incapacity. So there's really four of these documents that regardless of what other Estate Planning documents somebody has, they really need these four documents. And you've mentioned a couple already. Those are Financial Powers of Attorney, which is a Power of Attorney document that will allow someone to act financially on your behalf, but also in some ways legally on your behalf, if they need to ever go to court on your behalf or file taxes or do anything like that. And then there's the Healthcare Power of Attorney where you're nominating somebody to step in and make health care decisions for you. And then in addition to those two, we always want to see somebody have a standalone HIPAA authorizations so that their family members and their agents can have access to health care information. And then finally, they should always have a Living Will, which is where they spell out their end of life wishes.

Lisa Malak
So, Justin, how many people should we have ready to act on our behalf? And how do you figure out the best people to fill those roles?

Justin Randall
You know, it's always a good idea to have at least one backup to the initial agent that you've named. But you can really have as many backups as you feel comfortable with. With Financial Powers of Attorney. You can have co-agents act as well, so you can have more than one person acting. But you don't want to go overboard with it and have, you know, really more than three, I think would be the max that you would ever want to have on there. But when you're naming these people, really, the most important things that you want to keep in mind are do you trust this person because you're granting them a lot of authority and you don't want to put someone in this position that you don't have full trust, that they'll act in your best interest. And then really, are they responsible? Do they get things done on time? Because you don't want the procrastinator in the family paying the bills. Right. They you know, they don't need to be the lawyer or the financial planner in the family or the doctor for the Healthcare Power of Attorney, because they can always seek out advice from those professionals if they really need it.

Millaine Wells
All right. So we get the documents and the agents and places or anything else that needs to be done.

Justin Randall
So after that's in place, it's just really important to be careful about finding new documents afterwards. So a lot of times with and by law with Healthcare Powers of Attorney, by signing new documents, you'll revoke your prior Power of Attorney documents. And this can cause a lot of problems for people when they're unknowingly doing this. And the new document doesn't have all of the same authorities that the old document did. And so they can unknowingly cause themselves some headaches down the road or potentially from significant problems if their agents don't have the authority to act. So, just always talk with your attorney who drafted the documents for you to make sure that, you know, if you want to update those documents, you do so through them or an attorney and don't sign new documents without knowing what you're signing.

Lisa Malak
Okay. Well, it sounds like it's very important to get some advice from Hooper Law Office.