A Love letter to your family

~2008 NYSLAA conference report~

A Love Letter to Your Family
Presented by - Dennis Hebert, Certified Financial Planner

Workshop attended & reported by:
Peg Pelletier, Newark Public Library

The first session “A love letter to your family” was about the four key documents that everyone should have:

• A Will
• A Health Care Proxy
• A Living Will
• A Durable Power of Attorney

The speaker, Dennis Hebert, is a Certified Financial Planner, and he has a string of initials after his name for all of the other certifications he holds as well. He was a great speaker and really shed some light on these common forms that we have all heard of but that we haven’t all gotten around to doing.

He urged us to get them done, and told enough horror stories of people who had not or who had failed to update theirs: the ex-husband got everything even thought the wife had remarried and had kids, the twin boys - whose parents died in an car accident - got put in foster care for two years while the two sets of grandparents fought in court for custody, then the judge decided to award one child to each set of grandparents – a really tragic story. He urged everyone to use a lawyer when you have these forms made out, just to make sure you have dotted your I’s and crossed your t’s. We have a number of these forms available here in the library or online for people to do themselves, but perhaps if the patron(s) asks us, we should mention that they might do well to consult a lawyer.

The Will is self explanatory, though Dennis had some great points on what to include and what to leave out. The main thing is that loving families can find themselves fractured by the death of a family member and the potential “inheritance” that may or may not exist.

The Health Care Proxy is to authorize someone to made medical decisions on your behalf for non-lifesaving procedures. For example if you develop Alzheimer’s and can no longer make decisions for yourself.

The Living Will is the decision to prolong or end your life (according to your pre-set wishes) that someone can control if you are unable to do so. This is incredibly important as was illustrated in the seven long years of the Terri Schiavo case in Florida: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo , or the (for those of you old enough to remember it) Karen Ann Quinlan case in the mid-1970’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan

The last, the Durable Power of Attorney, differs from a Power of Attorney in that the POA ends with your ability to revoke it. ie; if you develop Alzheimer’s and are unable to revoke it, it is no longer a legal document. A DPOA lasts forever. Have one drawn up (with a lawyer), appointing your choice of person to manage you financial affairs should you become incapacitated. Tell that person you have this document and where it can be found if you should become incapacitated (not in a safe deposit box – they will need to access it sooner than that can be made to happen).

Dennis told the funny (sad) story of his family who had everything in the “blue box” and that the kids should “find the blue box” if anything should happen to the parents. Yet when something did happen, and the kids found the blue box, it contained an bunch of outdated stuff and nothing that they needed. It took him almost three years to sort out his parent’s estate.