Key paperwork may save your family from misery down the road
Talking with parents about estate planning is as easy for some as discussing lawn care. Everything from funeral plans, living wills and who gets the souvenir spoon collection is discussed freely and frankly.
Then there are most families.
For a topic so fraught with emotion, finding the right time and place to raise issues of aging, death and money seems to require a delicacy difficult to summon. But awkwardness around the kitchen table is nothing compared with the hassles in a courtroom if basic legal arrangements aren’t in place.
Kathy Heider, 55, and her five siblings grew up on a dairy farm near Janesville, Wis. Her mother, a widow, wanted her middle son to purchase and operate the farm, with money from the sale spread among siblings.
When Alzheimer’s disease hit, nobody had been appointed power of attorney — the legal right to act on the parent’s behalf when the parent is unable to do so.
So the family needed to apply for guardianship — requiring a judge’s approval and supervision. Guardianship also allows for challenges, which occurred when one sibling objected to the farm’s sale price.
What followed was a year of legal wrangling that cost more than $25,000 in legal fees.
Heider’s lawyer, Wally Shannon, says such cases are rare but demonstrate the benefits of establishing financial power of attorney, for which Shannon charges $75.
“If she had appointed a financial power of attorney, that person could have said, ‘OK, this is the appraised value,’ and it wouldn’t have mattered if any of us agreed,” Heider says. “It would have gone through, and the judge would not have to be involved at all.”
An estate planning and probate lawyer for 20 years, Wally Shannon recommends families cover four basic areas in their estate planning: a will, power of attorney for finances, power of attorney for health care and a living will. A good Web resource for tips on how to talk with family members about estate planning is familyeducation.com.
Shannon practices law in farm country, where stoic stereotypes aren’t too far off and where family conversations will lean more toward the Green Bay Packers than probate.
“To sit down over a beer casually when there’s not a trigger point is difficult,” he says. Some events lend themselves to discussing the issue, he adds, such as the death of grandparents.
“When the generation before passes and there are headaches related to their probate, that’s when [the parents] say, ‘Whoa, what do we have organized? Do we have anything organized?’ ” Shannon says. “And that’s the opportunity for the kids to say to their parents, ‘Hey, can we make sure the headaches you’re experiencing now are not ones your kids will experience?’ ”
Shannon also offers a simple and effective method for adult children to put the topic on the table: Settle their own estates and recommend their parents do the same.
Joe Tougas has written for The Blueroad Reader, Minnesota State University TODAY and Static magazine.
