This site is great! My wife and I were just discussing how we needed to get a living will/will written down so our wishes are clearly understood in the case of an emergency.
Great idea! One thing though - this is presumably USA specific but nowhere does it actually spell that out, which could be confusing/timewasting for any brits or aussies who want to get their shit together. E.g a UK will has completely different wording to a USA will.
this is presumably USA specific but nowhere does it actually spell that out
We humans have a hard time remembering that anything we communicate has _a lot_ of implicit context. On the Internet, this becomes especially conspicuous because our communications quickly escape the realm where that implicit context is known & valid. Up to now, the way to deal with that seems to be EULAs written in Legalese.
It's a morbid subject, but working in home health care I'm shocked by how many people are totally unprepared when it comes to end of life planning.
And it's not just relatively young people or unexpected deaths. Many senior citizens with decent sized estates are totally unprepared or just assume their family will figure it out.
You pass on a lot of additional stress and hardship to your loved ones by not being prepared.
I didn't see this covered under the will section but do talk to important people in your life while you are making your will. Nothing in your will should be a surprise to those that are involved in your estate after you die.
If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand.
If you have kids you need to discuss what happens to them, who takes care of them etc. This is a careful balance of the burden you put on family and friends and the well being of you children with the balance favoring your kids.
The most important thing is that you have these discussions and then document them in a will. Do not just fill out an online form, have it notarized and filed in a safe deposit box to be unearthed when you meet your end, timely or otherwise.
The process of creating a will like this can be a catalyst to re-prioritize your life and what is important to you and your family.
But of course, it doesn't have to be. As this site mentions, get your shit together! It's better to have a boilerplate will squirreled away somewhere that no one but your lawyer knows about than none at all.
When we made a will, the person who had advised us to do so said, "And don't put it in a safe-deposit box. It will greatly delay the availability if you die suddenly.
If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand.
Could you elaborate on why you should tell someone before hand that you're going to leave assets in their name? Is it just common courtesy/manners in your opinion? Or something else? I'm genuinely courageous.
Some things create hassles, especially illiquid assets like a house or yacht if that person has no desire for them and no knowledge about selling them.
Also, family conflicts. If your brother's uncle's nephew gets the house instead of the son who expects it, but there's good reason (he was renting it already), family conflicts arise for not great reasons.
as smileysteve said anything except for cash has it's own burdens and commitment associated with it.
If I left my house to my brother who travels all over the place and has a carefree life it might be more of a burden trying to maintain it, rent it out or sell it than its worth. It might not, but that's why I would talk to him before putting it in a will.
Also, having these kinds of conversations is good for everyone involved because it makes them think about the little details beforehand and not while they are in the middle of funeral plans and grieving.
It's called estate planning, not estate liquidation or estate lottery. You wouldn't make major plans regarding your family without talking to your spouse or business plans without talking to your partners.
Just because you won't be around doesn't mean you should treat it any differently. Anyone involved in your estate should be involved prior to your will going into effect whether they be executors, caregivers or recipients.
They might be confusing executor issues with beneficiary issues. The cost of maintaining an extra house, until it sells, can be kinda high in some areas, for example. And there are ways of handling this in the legal system, most of which involve the beneficiaries getting much less money (starting with asking a judge to assign an expensive lawyer as executor instead of whomever). And unfortunately some folks can't really keep their stuff together by themselves when you're alive under normal conditions, so dumping executorship on them is just going to totally mess them up, they can't run one household now temporarily they have two.
Someone who's totally clueless about 500 foot yachts is just going to get screwed over either as executor or inheritor... hope at least one of them is semi-clueful about yachts, hopefully ahead of time. There are bottom feeders who look thru the legal notices in the paper and will descend on the grieving victims with absolutely ridiculous offers to take the hassle away... for pennies on the dollar, if that. Oh that classic Ferrari in perfect condition, well, I can't really offer more than scrap steel price for that, and next thing you know some poor widow gets screwed out of $100K.
We were strongly advised not to do this. It puts you in a difficult bind if you change your mind later on. Plus there is little value in most beneficiaries knowing beforehand.
> This is a careful balance of the burden you put on family and friends and the well being of you children with the balance favoring your kids.
If the balance "favours your kids", presumably meaning that the new caretakers feel overwhelmed by that responsibility, I guess they could refuse that responsibility. I guess having that wish be in your will might pressure them sufficiently to actually go through with that responsibility, but that kind of pressuring somehow doesn't feel right either.
This is great advice all around, but get a local lawyer involved to prepare your will. Even in US, there is not a single set of laws that apply to wills and power of attorney. It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work and ultimately be ending up with a document that has little legal basis.
Do your loved ones a favor - hire a lawyer to do it. It's not free, but they'll do the actual paperwork, and you'll get the comfort of knowing it's done right.
There are a few grammatical errors in these documents as well that do not inspire confidence.
Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent.
Considering the laws of the 50 states are sometimes very different, and these documents cover a wide range of legal topics, I think you'd have to be an idiot to use these documents without running them by a lawyer in your state, because they might not have the consequences you think they have.
Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.
www.uslegalforms.com has been around for a long time now, and they at least have state-specific documents. Use them if you're going to use anything without consulting a lawyer. But really, pay a lawyer, it's worth it.
I think this got upvoted because it offers a monthly email nudge/reminder and hopefully the site/service will stay on top of future issues related to staying on top of keeping your stuff together.
But yeah, talk to a lawyer to ensure state specific issues are properly covered/handled.
Something I've always wish the Social Security Administration offered was an executor service of sorts.
They're the canonical reference if you're dead or not, so upon my death, I could have configured in their web interface:
* who to notify, along with documents for each person (personal letters, etc)
* who to turn bank accounts over to
* a whole long laundry list of other stuff I have to find someone I trust to do if I do sooner than expected
What organization is typically entrusted to do this sort of task? I don't mind paying for my loved ones to be secure and guided after my death, I just want an org that I can 1) trust and 2) will be around for 100+ years.
You may set your beneficiary for almost all of your bank accounts and financial accounts. You just have to notify them of your beneficiary. EDIT: This may only be for retirement accounts?
I use Simple for banking, which doesn't support this, but Betterment (who manages my retirement accounts) does. My wife is my primary beneficiary, and I've submitted a feature request to them that they support specifying a 501(c)(3) as my contingent beneficiary (Watsi, in case you're wondering) if we've both died at the same time.
I'm curious what their UX around it is; I should ask! Ideally, my wife would provide them proof of my death, and then they would say "Here are your options, and the consequences of each."
The SSA has a death index. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_Death_Index Banks probably register your SS number (which they are required to have) with the SSA for "notify if dead" (just a guess). Doubtful they give every financial institution the SS numbers of all deaths on a regular basis. Then again they might have direct access to such information since they can't open up an account for a dead person.
Of course it suck if you end up on it while you are still alive
>She learned that she was dead when she received a letter from her bank. The bank expressed its corporate condolences, and locked her out of her account. The Social Security Administration also stopped her retirement checks, and her health insurance also stopped.
You trust the government to do that? You're braver than I am. I would expect the government would have a great time knowing about everyone's end of life plans. The IRS would certainly love it. I don't trust the government to wash my car let alone ensure my family is protected if I were to die.
You, presumably as an American citizen, already trust the government to do a whole lot more than "wash your car," so the fear seems a bit unfounded. You implicitly trust them to fund/manage/develop/build: the entire infrastructure your car rides on (and which your safety depends on), the educational system that will likely educate/indoctrinate your children for 12+ years, and the legal system (and all of it's record keeping complexities) which preserves and allows you to uphold your rights and well-being. That's just to name a few that are certainly more complex than the task the GP is envisioning. Maybe you can pose a "free-market alternative" for the second one, but you can't for the other two. (Thankfully.) Plus, if you still prefer having a "real" physical executor there, just put that single person's name down for all of the fields from the SSA.
Adding a few fields to a database is well within the capabilities of pretty much every government agency around. At least until feature bloat and cruft starts to develop...
> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.
My guess is it struck a chord with people similar to myself - young family and minimal EOL planning. (although the snarky domain definitely helps)
For us, the biggest problem has been deciding who should take care of the kids if something happens to both myself and my spouse. The only members of our family that aren't shitty people or very flaky are elderly or have medical issues preventing them from caring for children. (And all of our close friends have kids and full lives of their own.) I would love to hear if anyone has suggestions for determining the least shitty choice in a situation like that.
Do you have any friends with kids of their own? We found in our planning that the people who had kids of similar age to ours were the best choice. They're already dealing with "kid stuff" and, other than finances, adding more kids doesn't totally change the nature of their life.
Make sure to have life insurance, and have your lawyer set it up as a trust for the child's well-being. You can designate someone other than the caretaker of the child to be the trustee of the trust if you want to decentralize responsibility, though in our case we found that unnecessary. In our case, we recognized that additional kids would mean our designees need a bigger house, so we took a very liberal view of what constitutes the children's well-being.
Also keep in mind that you may revise your choices over time. We reasoned that her friend is the best choice for this 5 years, but when our daughter gets a bit older, we can reevaluate and see who in our then-social-circle is the ideal.
I'm in a similar situation. The other members of both sides of our family are all either flaky, dirt poor, or too old to take care of our kids.
And one of our children is autistic and will likely need long-term care when she's an adult. Maybe one of our other children will step up when the time comes, but I can't count on that.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, this problem is solved with godparents. I'm not Catholic (and I don't have kids yet), but the model seems to make sense. Forgive me for stepping way beyond the bounds of "internet stranger's business" but if your close friends' lives are so full that they would not care for your children if you became incapacitated, you need better friends.
I strongly disagree with that view. I don't have children of my own and while I would open the door at 3 am to take friends in (or heck a neighbor) while we get things sorted out taking on children is a major life disrupting experience.
So yes saying no would be selfish, assuming that any of your friends would have their lives completely disrupted just because you have children seems quite a bit more selfish.
The point is that throughout history, raising children are considered the point of life, not trophies that are otherwise a distraction from vacations and toys.
Well, no. Traditionally care for those kids goes to the extended family, not the friends. Sneering at friends who won't take in children is not something that you can support in terms of an argument of tradition.
I come from the RC tradition as well, though we didn't baptize our children.
I can think of exactly two sets of people in our diverse set of friends (and they are good friends) whom we might ask for this kind of consideration, but really, even both of them are problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of our friendship.
I don't think it would solve the problem you are responding to, which is that the person doesn't know anyone they feel are capable of taking care of their children. Having a formal title for the role isn't going to help them find someone for the role.
There's no easy answer. You just gotta talk with close friends about it.
Taking care of more children would be difficult for my wife and I but I would strongly consider it if we were approached by one of our friends or family members about it.
Our life with 5 kids is already full but we are stable, love each other and have the resources, both emotional and financial to provide for more.
We would have to change our life and make sacrifices but that's what love is all about.
This doesn't really answer your question, it's more about taking care of someone else's children than finding someone to take care of your own. But if you are thinking about these things the other side is that you need to ask yourself if you could make the sacrifice to take in more kids yourself.
My criteria for choosing who would take care of my children are simple:
1. their family is emotionally capable.
2. the family is willing - including both parents and any children they already have.
We're talking about an already incredibly bad situation. My goal wouldn't be to give my kids everything they would have if they still had their parents. It would be to minimize the risk of more horrible things happening to them - abuse, abject poverty etc.
Agreed. And remember that the family taking on the kids doesn't necessarily need to be able to support them financially. Your will should designate sufficient funds to a trust account (either through your savings if you have enough, and/or through life insurance) to care for your kids through childhood. Plus ideally some extra for the people taking on this huge responsibility. Otherwise everything iamthepieman said.
Find a friend in the same situation as you, and agree to be each other's back-up parents. Get some term-life insurance in a fairly large amount to go in trust to the kids if your spouse dies; that will cover the expenses, and term-life is pretty darn cheap.
I'm in a similar situation and trying to make those same decisions. We ended up picking the ex-wife of a family member. Our immediate family did not fit our criteria and after we talked with her it seems like the best choice.
However, we are still struggling with how to distribute the life insurance in this case. Currently, she would get it all, but I think setting aside x% for education for each kid is worth considering (maybe y% for after college graduation). I realize someone taking in someone else's kids will incur some costs, so I think they should get 'something' - with two more kids, they may need to upgrade their house.
My parents made wills that nominated close friends as guardians for us kids. The friends nominated my parents as guardians for their kids. There would have been enough value in either house to cover any extra costs of looking after the orphaned set of kids.
The key to cutting through this incredibly difficult question is to remember : at that point, you're out of the picture and whatever hopes and dreams you had for the kids now come a distant second place to finding the best way forward for them in a horrific situation. Your kids are going to be messed up if your gone, no question. At that point the focus should be on 'loving family' first and everything else distant second. If that means another city, state or country,so be it. If that means them living in a family with less money, so be it. If you vote for the purple party and they vote for the yellow part, so be it. Your kids will end up voting yellow but at least they will be loved and supported.
Find a loving family, they are the answer. And make sure the life insurance is sorted out.
> who should take care of the kids if something happens to both myself and my spouse
I would expect this to be a very rare occurrence. Most likely is an accident that kills one of the parents only, but in most scenarios where both parents are together, they would have the children with them. I guess it's always important to plan for risks, even if they are rare, if the consequences are very bad - 'high threat, low probability' is the military term, I believe?
It's at least a checklist and covers stuff you should be thinking about but may not have thought of (even if not financial such as the Thoughts section).
For instance, my wife and I need more videos of us and not just the kid. If something happened to me tomorrow I would love it if my wife could show him videos of me when he gets older.
I agree that maybe the site needs a disclaimer that getting a lawyer is better but for some isn't a generic form better than nothing? Not a lawyer either so not entirely sure about that.
For the videos, you two might want to record some of your stories and values. If you have iPhones, I've built an app that guides you through it -- http://www.oakvideos.com
I'm the original poster and I'm not affiliated with the author in any way. The core message of OP is not "we offer 100% legalese-proof papers", but "I'm a wake up call, now go and get things done".
> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.
Or maybe it's because the site is a useful checklist of what we should do to prevent death from completely destroying our family.
I'm the original poster and I'm not affiliated with the author in any way. The core message is not "we offer 100% legalese-proof papers", the pdfs are described as templates. The core message is:
Get your shit together now and breathe a huge sigh of relief.
I thought this is a great starting point.
Also, after looking through the actual wills, they are already filled out with George Washington's information so the legal documents are used as an example, not for actual legal use.
Plus, I'm not sure my family would enjoy looking through my will upon my death with: Get Your Shit Together! printed at the bottom of each page :)
This site is helpful to let me know which parts I overlooked like simple things like passwords or account access.
I just coughed up my email to get the reminders, because,
(employers don't read this:) I'm a lazy procrastinating POS.
I'll probably use LegalZoom to get the forms if I ever do
get off my ass and get it done.
> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this.
If you view this as an MVP of an open source repository for EOL information then it makes total sense that it got upvoted here. If we can keep our code dry, why can't we keep our lives dry?
HN voting rings are fairly tough to actually get working. I doubt this site used one. Also, a small number of upvotes from varying accounts (in terms of age, location, reputation, etc) can cause a post to hit the front page.
Exactly! My dad remarried and moved to Georgia. He didn't change the will at all thinking all are set.
When he passed away, I found out that the will is invalidated because that's how it works in Georgia's legal system. Luckily my dad's wife is a nice woman and worked with me to ensure the estate went through probate properly.
But always double check when your life's circumstances change (new residence, etc)
Even with a will, in some places the probate process is very expensive and onerous. In many cases, it's a lot easier to use a simple trust mechanism vs. a will. 3 hours of attorney time now can avoid 50 hours + lots of calendar time later.
Did it through RocketLawyer myself, and they have attorneys to review it as well as to guarantee it's legal in the state you live in. I also did my living will through them, all legitimate.
"It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work"
You won't be doing a "whole lot of work", but anyway, what works really well is giving a lawyer professional paperwork from another state (or whatever) and telling him to fix it for your state's laws.
They handle this kind of "translation" all the time because of people who moved in from another state, they might be a bit confused if you moved in from the state of "the internet" but it'll be less confusing than walking in with a completely blank slate. At least they'll have to ask a lot fewer questions and explain a lot fewer things. Spending money to telling a lawyer "i donno" can be very expensive compared to how cheap it is to tell him something like "I want the inheritance to work something similar to Wisconsin law"
Think by analogy of doing desktop support for a guy who can't articulate anything clearer than "the internet is broken on the hard drive", its gonna cost him a lot. But if the guy walked in with professional documentation of his specific problem, its gonna be a lot cheaper.
If you don't, or cash strapped now, you can get by with Nolo press. If you can understand ROR, and programming, after reading their two books on wills and trusts, I think you can
set up a trust and will, and skip the lawyer.
On the will get two signatures from people not in the will, and it does not need to be notarized in California. If you want to exclude a child out of a estate you must explicitly state that in the will.(Some kids got a lot of cash early on. Explain to them you love them. Make sure they are doing well, if you exclude them.) I recently did a will for a friend. Her daughter took all the family money when her father died--leaving her mother with nothing. The ironic part is her daughter is a multimillionaire in LA, with a successful business. She took advantatage of a bad situation, and a angry dying man. So yes, I didn't feel it was immoral to exclude her from the will of that friend.
There are plenty of bad lawyers out there, so if you're going to hire one, please do the legwork (get referrals, speak to multiple candidates) to find a good, trusted one.
If anyone needs convincing to use this site, read the About Us page. It's a big credit to Chanel Reynolds that she was able to drawn on a tragic experience to help others.
I'm the sole income earner for our household (my wife is at home with our wee ones). I've found that it's a lot easier to plan for my own disability/death than for hers.
For instance, I get relatively straightforward short-term and long-term disability insurance through my company. Should I become disabled, I get a percentage of my salary. But because my wife does not work, we've struggled to find a straightforward way to get (reasonably priced) disability insurance for her.
I'm assuming that many of you who are either self-employed or are in a household in which one person is not currently working have faced similar challenges. Anybody have any recommendations about how to overcome them?
There is a spreadsheet included with this book [1] that helps you figure out how much life insurance to get your non-working spouse. We signed up for private term life - it was substantially less expensive than my employer's optional term life plan. Plus it's decoupled from whatever job you happen to hold at the time!
Get the minimum insurance you will need to take care of your kids and pay any debts that would be hard or impossible to pay if your wife were to become disabled.
Anytime you buy insurance you have to be ready to do some math. If you make enough to cover a caregiver (often covered or partially covered under health insurance) for your wife and have a strategy for taking care of your kids then you may not even need it.
I'm fortunate enough to live close to both my parents and my wife's parents. Because of this and because we have decent savings we decided against disability and life insurance for her. We are in the process of getting better life insurance for myself but are keeping it as low as possible to cover our debts and living expenses until the children are old enough to go to work in the coal mines.
Create an account on ssa.gov to estimate your Social Security Disability benefits and Social Security Survivors benefits. Mine are plenty enough for me to live comfortably on but I have a very, very modest lifestyle without any debt.
If fact you should create an account on ssa.gov and irs.gov no matter what so nobody else does it for you if your identity is stolen.
Heading to Egypt with my wife for two weeks while our 2 year old daughter stays at home. Definitely something we've been trying to get together, and I really appreciate someone doing the leg work.
I think there are several out there, the best one I've found for simple will and living wills (and free, no monthly charge bs) is http://www.doyourownwill.com It also has good general advice and a legal forms section..and was fast. pdf and doc. made it easy for us.
I think there are several out there, the best one I've found for simple will and living wills (and free, no monthly charge bs) is http://www.doyourownwill.com It also has good general advice and a legal forms section..and was fast. pdf and doc. made it easy for us.
Certain countries require you by law to appoint an executor to your estate. If you don't, the state steps in and does it for you. Hardly the sort of thing you'd want, especially if you want it done properly.
You can appoint lawyers to be executors to your estate, mind you. They take a fee from the total bucket, and make sure everything is done according to your will.
Also, as far as I'm aware, appointing them the executor of your estate doesn't mean you give them the money. You entrust them with resolving all the issues with your estate, it's a bit different.
I doubt these documents would be worth anything without getting notarized. Among other problems. Getting something notarized runs from free-around $2 so it's hilarious they expect you to track down two impartial witnesses but don't even mention a notary public.
If you are familiar with the current pending Supreme Court case DeBoer v. Snyder (which for the Supreme Court was combined with 3 other cases) you'd know in many cases you can't just appoint any guardian for your children upon your death. Basically the facts are: a lesbian couple has 4 children - 2 adopted by one woman and 2 adopted by the other. All children have been raised together as brothers and sisters by both women. No children we ever being raised by only one parent. They found out that they couldn't guarantee that the other parent would keep all 4 children in the event of the death of one parent. Under Michigan law, in their case, the courts would be free to appoint guardianship of the deceased's two children to whomever they choose no matter the paperwork the couple drafted beforehand.
>Their close call with the truck that day in 2011 led them to a lawyer, Dana Nessel, who advised them that she could draw up guardianship papers, but that they would be nearly worthless legally. She urged them instead to file a federal lawsuit challenging the adoption law in Michigan.
Unless you are in the complete bonies you can track down to impartial witness very quickly - your neighbors, or if you know them well their neighbors, etc.
The law of wills can be peculiar. Under New York law a will MUST be signed by two witnesses to be valid (EPTL §3-2.1). A notarization won't cut it - a notary can be a witness just like anyone else but you still need a second witness.
On the other hand a trust can be either notarized or witnessed (EPTL §7-1.17) and a power of attorney must be notarized (General Obligations Law §5-1501B, which also requires a typeface "no less than twelve point in size").
Regarding a living will, one I've seen that I really like is Five Wishes (https://www.agingwithdignity.org/five-wishes.php). I have one filled out that I've been procrastinating giving to friends and doctors, which is a mandatory step for having it be an effective document. Thank you to GYST for reminding me I need to take care of this.
AAA...west coast life.. your work place... etc. Cheap is also very relative - depending on the face amount, you may have to submit to a health examination...
153 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadWe humans have a hard time remembering that anything we communicate has _a lot_ of implicit context. On the Internet, this becomes especially conspicuous because our communications quickly escape the realm where that implicit context is known & valid. Up to now, the way to deal with that seems to be EULAs written in Legalese.
And it's not just relatively young people or unexpected deaths. Many senior citizens with decent sized estates are totally unprepared or just assume their family will figure it out.
You pass on a lot of additional stress and hardship to your loved ones by not being prepared.
I love the site title btw.
The relative worked in the financial services industry and had provided me advice about estate planning.
When it came to the estate things were not prepared at all. If fact it was a bit of a mess.
I guess it's the case of builders living in unfinished houses and that.
I need to get my shit together.
If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand.
If you have kids you need to discuss what happens to them, who takes care of them etc. This is a careful balance of the burden you put on family and friends and the well being of you children with the balance favoring your kids.
The most important thing is that you have these discussions and then document them in a will. Do not just fill out an online form, have it notarized and filed in a safe deposit box to be unearthed when you meet your end, timely or otherwise.
The process of creating a will like this can be a catalyst to re-prioritize your life and what is important to you and your family.
But of course, it doesn't have to be. As this site mentions, get your shit together! It's better to have a boilerplate will squirreled away somewhere that no one but your lawyer knows about than none at all.
Also, family conflicts. If your brother's uncle's nephew gets the house instead of the son who expects it, but there's good reason (he was renting it already), family conflicts arise for not great reasons.
If I left my house to my brother who travels all over the place and has a carefree life it might be more of a burden trying to maintain it, rent it out or sell it than its worth. It might not, but that's why I would talk to him before putting it in a will.
Also, having these kinds of conversations is good for everyone involved because it makes them think about the little details beforehand and not while they are in the middle of funeral plans and grieving.
It's called estate planning, not estate liquidation or estate lottery. You wouldn't make major plans regarding your family without talking to your spouse or business plans without talking to your partners.
Just because you won't be around doesn't mean you should treat it any differently. Anyone involved in your estate should be involved prior to your will going into effect whether they be executors, caregivers or recipients.
Someone who's totally clueless about 500 foot yachts is just going to get screwed over either as executor or inheritor... hope at least one of them is semi-clueful about yachts, hopefully ahead of time. There are bottom feeders who look thru the legal notices in the paper and will descend on the grieving victims with absolutely ridiculous offers to take the hassle away... for pennies on the dollar, if that. Oh that classic Ferrari in perfect condition, well, I can't really offer more than scrap steel price for that, and next thing you know some poor widow gets screwed out of $100K.
If the balance "favours your kids", presumably meaning that the new caretakers feel overwhelmed by that responsibility, I guess they could refuse that responsibility. I guess having that wish be in your will might pressure them sufficiently to actually go through with that responsibility, but that kind of pressuring somehow doesn't feel right either.
I ended up enrolling in California's Disability Insurance Elective Coverage (DIEC) - http://www.edd.ca.gov/disability/self-employed.htm. I wonder if anyone else has gone this route?
Do your loved ones a favor - hire a lawyer to do it. It's not free, but they'll do the actual paperwork, and you'll get the comfort of knowing it's done right.
Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent.
Considering the laws of the 50 states are sometimes very different, and these documents cover a wide range of legal topics, I think you'd have to be an idiot to use these documents without running them by a lawyer in your state, because they might not have the consequences you think they have.
Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows.
www.uslegalforms.com has been around for a long time now, and they at least have state-specific documents. Use them if you're going to use anything without consulting a lawyer. But really, pay a lawyer, it's worth it.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
I think this got upvoted because it offers a monthly email nudge/reminder and hopefully the site/service will stay on top of future issues related to staying on top of keeping your stuff together.
But yeah, talk to a lawyer to ensure state specific issues are properly covered/handled.
They're the canonical reference if you're dead or not, so upon my death, I could have configured in their web interface:
* who to notify, along with documents for each person (personal letters, etc)
* who to turn bank accounts over to
* a whole long laundry list of other stuff I have to find someone I trust to do if I do sooner than expected
What organization is typically entrusted to do this sort of task? I don't mind paying for my loved ones to be secure and guided after my death, I just want an org that I can 1) trust and 2) will be around for 100+ years.
I'm curious what their UX around it is; I should ask! Ideally, my wife would provide them proof of my death, and then they would say "Here are your options, and the consequences of each."
Of course it suck if you end up on it while you are still alive
http://consumerist.com/2015/05/04/being-declared-dead-by-the...
>She learned that she was dead when she received a letter from her bank. The bank expressed its corporate condolences, and locked her out of her account. The Social Security Administration also stopped her retirement checks, and her health insurance also stopped.
Adding a few fields to a database is well within the capabilities of pretty much every government agency around. At least until feature bloat and cruft starts to develop...
My guess is it struck a chord with people similar to myself - young family and minimal EOL planning. (although the snarky domain definitely helps)
For us, the biggest problem has been deciding who should take care of the kids if something happens to both myself and my spouse. The only members of our family that aren't shitty people or very flaky are elderly or have medical issues preventing them from caring for children. (And all of our close friends have kids and full lives of their own.) I would love to hear if anyone has suggestions for determining the least shitty choice in a situation like that.
Make sure to have life insurance, and have your lawyer set it up as a trust for the child's well-being. You can designate someone other than the caretaker of the child to be the trustee of the trust if you want to decentralize responsibility, though in our case we found that unnecessary. In our case, we recognized that additional kids would mean our designees need a bigger house, so we took a very liberal view of what constitutes the children's well-being.
Also keep in mind that you may revise your choices over time. We reasoned that her friend is the best choice for this 5 years, but when our daughter gets a bit older, we can reevaluate and see who in our then-social-circle is the ideal.
And one of our children is autistic and will likely need long-term care when she's an adult. Maybe one of our other children will step up when the time comes, but I can't count on that.
My plan is to live forever.
So yes saying no would be selfish, assuming that any of your friends would have their lives completely disrupted just because you have children seems quite a bit more selfish.
I can think of exactly two sets of people in our diverse set of friends (and they are good friends) whom we might ask for this kind of consideration, but really, even both of them are problematic for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of our friendship.
Taking care of more children would be difficult for my wife and I but I would strongly consider it if we were approached by one of our friends or family members about it.
Our life with 5 kids is already full but we are stable, love each other and have the resources, both emotional and financial to provide for more.
We would have to change our life and make sacrifices but that's what love is all about.
This doesn't really answer your question, it's more about taking care of someone else's children than finding someone to take care of your own. But if you are thinking about these things the other side is that you need to ask yourself if you could make the sacrifice to take in more kids yourself.
My criteria for choosing who would take care of my children are simple:
1. their family is emotionally capable. 2. the family is willing - including both parents and any children they already have.
We're talking about an already incredibly bad situation. My goal wouldn't be to give my kids everything they would have if they still had their parents. It would be to minimize the risk of more horrible things happening to them - abuse, abject poverty etc.
However, we are still struggling with how to distribute the life insurance in this case. Currently, she would get it all, but I think setting aside x% for education for each kid is worth considering (maybe y% for after college graduation). I realize someone taking in someone else's kids will incur some costs, so I think they should get 'something' - with two more kids, they may need to upgrade their house.
Thoughts on %'s or amounts?
Not saying it is not useful or important. It just doesn't fit the subject matter people come here to read.
Find a loving family, they are the answer. And make sure the life insurance is sorted out.
I would expect this to be a very rare occurrence. Most likely is an accident that kills one of the parents only, but in most scenarios where both parents are together, they would have the children with them. I guess it's always important to plan for risks, even if they are rare, if the consequences are very bad - 'high threat, low probability' is the military term, I believe?
For instance, my wife and I need more videos of us and not just the kid. If something happened to me tomorrow I would love it if my wife could show him videos of me when he gets older.
I agree that maybe the site needs a disclaimer that getting a lawyer is better but for some isn't a generic form better than nothing? Not a lawyer either so not entirely sure about that.
Or maybe it's because the site is a useful checklist of what we should do to prevent death from completely destroying our family.
I'm the original poster and I'm not affiliated with the author in any way. The core message is not "we offer 100% legalese-proof papers", the pdfs are described as templates. The core message is:
Plus, I'm not sure my family would enjoy looking through my will upon my death with: Get Your Shit Together! printed at the bottom of each page :)
This site is helpful to let me know which parts I overlooked like simple things like passwords or account access.
Who cares? I'd make "get your shit together" a condition of inheriting anything from me if it had any legal standing.
If you view this as an MVP of an open source repository for EOL information then it makes total sense that it got upvoted here. If we can keep our code dry, why can't we keep our lives dry?
When he passed away, I found out that the will is invalidated because that's how it works in Georgia's legal system. Luckily my dad's wife is a nice woman and worked with me to ensure the estate went through probate properly.
But always double check when your life's circumstances change (new residence, etc)
Even with a will, in some places the probate process is very expensive and onerous. In many cases, it's a lot easier to use a simple trust mechanism vs. a will. 3 hours of attorney time now can avoid 50 hours + lots of calendar time later.
You won't be doing a "whole lot of work", but anyway, what works really well is giving a lawyer professional paperwork from another state (or whatever) and telling him to fix it for your state's laws.
They handle this kind of "translation" all the time because of people who moved in from another state, they might be a bit confused if you moved in from the state of "the internet" but it'll be less confusing than walking in with a completely blank slate. At least they'll have to ask a lot fewer questions and explain a lot fewer things. Spending money to telling a lawyer "i donno" can be very expensive compared to how cheap it is to tell him something like "I want the inheritance to work something similar to Wisconsin law"
Think by analogy of doing desktop support for a guy who can't articulate anything clearer than "the internet is broken on the hard drive", its gonna cost him a lot. But if the guy walked in with professional documentation of his specific problem, its gonna be a lot cheaper.
If you don't, or cash strapped now, you can get by with Nolo press. If you can understand ROR, and programming, after reading their two books on wills and trusts, I think you can set up a trust and will, and skip the lawyer.
On the will get two signatures from people not in the will, and it does not need to be notarized in California. If you want to exclude a child out of a estate you must explicitly state that in the will.(Some kids got a lot of cash early on. Explain to them you love them. Make sure they are doing well, if you exclude them.) I recently did a will for a friend. Her daughter took all the family money when her father died--leaving her mother with nothing. The ironic part is her daughter is a multimillionaire in LA, with a successful business. She took advantatage of a bad situation, and a angry dying man. So yes, I didn't feel it was immoral to exclude her from the will of that friend.
For instance, I get relatively straightforward short-term and long-term disability insurance through my company. Should I become disabled, I get a percentage of my salary. But because my wife does not work, we've struggled to find a straightforward way to get (reasonably priced) disability insurance for her.
I'm assuming that many of you who are either self-employed or are in a household in which one person is not currently working have faced similar challenges. Anybody have any recommendations about how to overcome them?
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Ultimate-Financial-Plan-Balancing/...
Anytime you buy insurance you have to be ready to do some math. If you make enough to cover a caregiver (often covered or partially covered under health insurance) for your wife and have a strategy for taking care of your kids then you may not even need it.
I'm fortunate enough to live close to both my parents and my wife's parents. Because of this and because we have decent savings we decided against disability and life insurance for her. We are in the process of getting better life insurance for myself but are keeping it as low as possible to cover our debts and living expenses until the children are old enough to go to work in the coal mines.
If fact you should create an account on ssa.gov and irs.gov no matter what so nobody else does it for you if your identity is stolen.
* Document -all- of your bank accounts, assets and debts.
* Don't die without a will. If you do and you appoint an executor, you are giving them a very dirty job.
* Think twice about offshore accounts. They are a nightmare for executors.
This is one of the reasons I've been putting off completing a will :-( Is there a good option for going about this without naming an executor?
You can appoint lawyers to be executors to your estate, mind you. They take a fee from the total bucket, and make sure everything is done according to your will.
Also, as far as I'm aware, appointing them the executor of your estate doesn't mean you give them the money. You entrust them with resolving all the issues with your estate, it's a bit different.
If you are familiar with the current pending Supreme Court case DeBoer v. Snyder (which for the Supreme Court was combined with 3 other cases) you'd know in many cases you can't just appoint any guardian for your children upon your death. Basically the facts are: a lesbian couple has 4 children - 2 adopted by one woman and 2 adopted by the other. All children have been raised together as brothers and sisters by both women. No children we ever being raised by only one parent. They found out that they couldn't guarantee that the other parent would keep all 4 children in the event of the death of one parent. Under Michigan law, in their case, the courts would be free to appoint guardianship of the deceased's two children to whomever they choose no matter the paperwork the couple drafted beforehand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/us/one-couples-unanticipat...
>Their close call with the truck that day in 2011 led them to a lawyer, Dana Nessel, who advised them that she could draw up guardianship papers, but that they would be nearly worthless legally. She urged them instead to file a federal lawsuit challenging the adoption law in Michigan.
On the other hand a trust can be either notarized or witnessed (EPTL §7-1.17) and a power of attorney must be notarized (General Obligations Law §5-1501B, which also requires a typeface "no less than twelve point in size").
http://www.amazon.com/Quicken-WillMaker-Plus-2015-Software/d...
Nolo is a well-known established company, like LegalZoom for books, and I've also used their stuff for business setup and contracts.