An Advance Health Care
Directive (AHCD) lets your physician, family, and friends
know your health care preferences, including the types of special
treatment you want or don't want at the end of life. This includes
your desire for diagnostic testing, surgical procedures, cardiopulmonary
resuscitation, and organ donation.
By considering your options early, you can ensure
what is important to you and avoid having your family "guess"
your wishes or having to make critical medical-care decisions
for you under stress or in emotional turmoil. Fact
Sheet and Form >>
About Estate Planning
and Trust Management
Estate Planning<
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A key deficiency in the process of planning for long term
care occurs when seniors fail to provide for orderly distribution
of assets at death and fail to let their family know what to do
when the senior can no longer handle his or her own affairs.
Estate
planning from a qualified estate planning attorney, a financial
adviser who specializes in estate planning or a CPA planner is
the design of documents to provide the orderly transfer of assets
and property to the next generation. Wills, living trusts and
a myriad of other trust documents or business arrangements to
avoid estate taxes, income tax and real estate capitol gains are
some of the principal documents used. Estate planning also concerns
issues of business succession or disability of a business owner.
Many estate planners are also adding final
directive or end-of-life documents such as living wills, powers
of attorney and special medical directives. But often these are
considered secondary to the process of transferring assets or
property. Unfortunately, these documents are much more important
to family caregivers dealing with the needs of elderly loved ones.
Estate planners also need to become more involved
in the planning process for long term care by helping in the production
of a written long term care plan. This should also include meetings
with potential family caregivers and instructions or checklists
for these people. This important aspect of planning is often overlooked.
Elders or their families who are assisting
them should insist on more careful planning for long term care
issues when doing an estate plan.
Some advisers have recognized this need and have put together
a team of experts such as attorneys, care managers and financial
planners who provide a more complete and comprehensive approach
to estate planning, long term care and end-of-life issues.
Trust Management
Many people who create trusts or wills or both will designate
a trust company or bank to be a trustee for their property instead
of using a member of the family or close friend to do this. The
reason is that, all too often, assets are mismanaged or even stolen
by family members or friends. Using a trust company that has a
legally mandated, public fiduciary responsibility avoids this
problem.
Trust companies are valuable partners in the
management of trusts and in the process of estate planning. These
companies, for a small fee, will manage and invest assets, maintain
escrow accounts, hold property pending an exchange sale, provide
life insurance and income annuities and provide safekeeping of
valuables.
A trust is a legal document that "entrusts"
property to a trustee (a bank, attorney, individual or trust company)
to manage for a person or persons (beneficiaries of the trust)
whom the maker of the trust wants to benefit. In most cases, the
maker of a trust is creating a benefit for a loved one that will
be distributed after the death of the creator or maker of the
trust. Trusts usually involve very specific and detailed instructions
on how a trustee is to carry out the duty of managing or distributing
the property on behalf of a beneficiary.
A trustee will manage investments, keep records,
manage assets and prepare court accountings, paying bills and
(depending on the nature of the trust) medical expenses, charitable
gifts, inheritances or other distributions of income and principal.
A trust relationship is also created in a
will when the maker of the will specifies an entity to be an executor
or personal representative of the estate. This person or company
then becomes a trustee for the deceased individual who made the
will. The responsibilities of an executor in settling the estate
of a deceased person include collecting debts, settling claims
for debt and taxes, accounting for assets to the courts and distributing
wealth to beneficiaries.
A third party trust officer such as a bank,
attorney or trust company may also assume the role of a guardian
for a minor child, distributing assets in a prearranged manner
when the child becomes an adult. Or the trust officer may also
act on behalf of a developmentally disabled or mentally retarded
person distributing assets under a special needs trust.
Trusts are most often used with estate planning.
The purpose of estate planning is to minimize the cost and streamline
the process of distributing assets to the next generation. Here
are some of the more common reasons people create trusts in estate
planning.
Advance
Directives
