Fail to plan? Plan to fail. Your family’s financial future should not be left to chance. A thorough, thoughtful plan that provides for you and your family as you desire is a gift you give to those close to you and those you will leave behind.

The law  lets us say who we want to take care of us and our property through mechanisms like powers of attorney, health care powers of attorney, advance directives and trusts, so we don’t burden our families with having to guess or subject ourselves unnecessarily to interference from courts deciding what they may think is in our best interests.

Power of Attorney documents can give another person the ability to transact on our behalf, and if they are “durable” can survive our incapacity. But caution is needed: One granting another power of attorney must be completely sure that the person will always act in your best interests as your agent, and understands your personal preferences in how you want to live and how you want your resources managed. This can avoid a court proceeding to have someone appointed as your conservator, which requires a public proceeding to determine incapacity, which can be humiliating.

Health Care Power of Attorney (HCPOA) documents can give someone the ability to communicate and decide on your behalf about your medical care when you are no longer in a position to do so. Again, it is very important that the person granted the power acting as your agent understands your personal preferences for medical care, including end-of-life treatment preferences.  This can help us avoid guardianship proceedings which, like conservatorship, involve a public proceeding to determine our incapacity.

What is known as a Living Will is a document that instructs health care providers on whether you want life-sustaining treatment in the face of a terminal condition in a persistent vegetative state.  It takes the decision out of the hands of a family member or anyone named as an agent in a HCPOA, communicating preferences directly from you  to medical providers. It usually says that no heroic measures will be used to prolong your life, but only comfort care will be provided.

Trusts can include provisions for managing our assets and our personal affairs and care, by naming a “trustee” and placing assets into the trust that will then be used for our care, and distributed at death as the trust directs upon death. This usually avoids the public probate process for not only guardianship or conservatorship while we are alive, but the probate at death that distributes estates. People usually have a will that “pours” everything into the trust that the person didn’t place into the trust before their passing.

Beneficiary Designations on life insurance, retirement plans like 401(k) and IRA’s, provide to whom any balance will be paid when you die. Those should be reviewed annually to be sure they still reflect your wishes.

Don’t have a will?  Then the state has written one for you, and you probably wouldn’t like what it says! Each state has what is known as an “intestacy statute” (Maine’s is 18-A MRSA Section 2-101, et seq) which provides what will happen with your estate after you die if you did not leave a validly executed will.  In Maine, the intestacy statute first looks at whether you left a surviving spouse, children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents and others, and depending on who survived you, your estate will be divided among them in varying share amounts. These amounts may be quite different from what you would want, so it makes sense to decide what those amounts should be – if any – on your terms. There are limits on the ability to not include a spouse, because of their rights in property. Most charitable gifts through estates need to be specified in a will or trust, so intestacy will not address those.

So take the time to plan, and create certainty around how you will be cared for, your assets managed for you and then distributed as you would want them to be, rather than leaving it all to chance.