Speakers: Maritess Bott and Unidentified Off-Camera Speaker
[Music]Off-Camera Speaker:
Hey Maritess, I would love to know more about what a young person can do to prepare for their future.
Maritess:
Yeah, wonderful, thank you. Hello everyone, I’m Maritess Bott, thank you for watching our video blog.
Yeah, today’s topic is interesting because there’s a lot of young people out there that think, “Oh yeah, I don’t need anything right now. I don’t need to do any type of estate planning.” But when you turn 18, you’re considered an adult in the eyes of the law. So it means that when you’re at a hospital and your parents call in and say, “I want to know what’s going on with Johnny,” they can’t get information without your authorization. You are the adult. You have full rights to say, “Nope, they get nothing.”
And the same thing for money. So if you have bank accounts, if you have student accounts through your college or university—your mom, your dad can’t go and just be like, “I need to tell you about my situation with Johnny’s tuition.” They have to get authorization as well.
So I’m a big fan of, as soon as you hit 18, get some documents in order. Meaning the Health Care Power of Attorney, the Property Power of Attorney. That gives your parents some authorizations. That’s huge. And then the other two—HIPAA form access to medical records, because you might be at a hospital or doctor’s office and they need to get information. And then the last thing is a Living Will Declaration, which is just the, heaven forbid, terminal situation of pulling the plug or not pulling the plug. So those are four really big documents.
One thing I do always offer and tell my clients that we like to give young adults is a DocuBank membership as well. So DocuBank is a third-party company that we’ve been using for over 20 years, and basically they give you a card that you keep in your wallet. So if something happens to you—I’m in school, I’m in college, and I get into a car accident, and I’m unable to make decisions because I’m unconscious—hopefully the EMT, the nurse, someone at the hospital finds your driver’s license and this DocuBank card.
The DocuBank card will give them authorization to go online or even by fax to get access to your Health Care Power of Attorney or HIPAA form. All the things that matter so they can access that information immediately. If you’re unconscious, how are they supposed to know you even have those documents, right? If you’re unconscious, how would they know how to call your emergency people, your parents, your family members?
Your phone? You think, “Oh yeah, you can just find the information there.” But a lot of people don’t have the ability to just get access to the emergency people on your phone. There’s protections—you have to have a password to get on your phone. So this is a physical card that has the name of your mom or your dad with their phone number that hopefully they can find right away—they meaning the EMT or nurse. And they can call your family members immediately and get documents.
So those are really, really key documents. Very important. I know that the goal is never to use them, the goal is to always just be like, “Okay, I’m healthy, I don’t need anything.” But this is just in case, because none of us have a crystal ball of what’s going to happen with our lives.
I also want to share one quick story of something that really was kind of sad. It’s about a young person, I want to say she was maybe either 18 or 19. She was in a car with her boyfriend, and sadly it was a car accident that killed both of them. There was a lawsuit. There was some exchange because certainly there’s insurance being involved.
I’m being contacted by the grandmother of the young lady, and grandma is saying, “Here, my granddaughter died, now they’re calling me because there’s a check that’s been paid out and it’s to the estate of—I’ll call her Jane. Estate of Jane. Can I cash this? What can I do?”
So then I started asking questions. It turns out that Grandma has been the legal guardian of Jane for as long as she remembers. She raised her granddaughter. She didn’t formally adopt her granddaughter; she was legal guardian (which you can do through a guardianship proceeding). So Jane dies, and when we open a probate estate—if you have no will, no trust, no documents—we go through the laws of intestacy. Which here in Illinois says, if you have surviving parents it goes to your parents in equal shares. There’s no provision for your legal guardian, regardless of the fact that Grandma is the only parent Jane ever had.
Then it turns out, I ask more questions. Grandma tells me that her daughter, the mother of Jane, is whereabouts unknown. I guess she was into drugs and alcohol. She met a man, had relations, and never had any communication or relationship, so we don’t even know who Jane’s father is. We don’t know Jane’s mother’s whereabouts, so there’s no way we can send notice to open this probate estate.
What saddened me about the situation is Grandma—the person who should get the funds, the person that took care of Jane—should be the one who gets it. But as I told her, the obstacles we’d have to go through in order for her to even remotely get the money… we’d have to put it out there, try to get access or get in touch with the mother and the father of Jane, we’d have to file a publication. So they could come out of the woodwork—even this father we don’t even know could show up, say, “I’m the father, let’s do a DNA test,” and then he gets the money. So Grandma could do all this work and never get a dime.
We were talking about weighing the cost versus the benefit, the potential. Honestly, I didn’t push her. I told her, I’ll work with you either way. But the problem was Grandma didn’t have the funds to go into probate and to pay a lawyer and all of that, so that was also taken into consideration. There were too many factors for her, and Grandma was really not up for the challenge—at least from our conversation. We ended the conversation. I think we had another conversation after, but we never ended up doing anything or opening the probate estate.
But the story really resonates with me, because people always tell me, “Oh, I’m young, I don’t have any assets, I don’t need a will.” And you wouldn’t think an 18-year-old would really need a will, but once you even have a bank account, once you have anything, you should have a will. Because if Jane had a will that said, “I’m giving everything to Grandma,” then Grandma would have had at least a fighting chance. She would have gotten the money, because there’s a will involved. She would have had to go through the process, but it was like half a million dollars—she would have gotten all of it.
So at the end of the day, long and short of it is, when you’re young you think, “I don’t need a will.” I would say, just have one. No, we can’t predict that we’re going to get into a car accident and have some type of settlement. But we don’t know what’s going to happen in our lives, so why not have a will?
So, like I said earlier, when you go off to college you definitely need the Power of Attorney, the Living Will, the HIPAA form—but we may as well add the will in there. You may as well have a will. Because at the end of the day, you’re hoping to accumulate some assets, and eventually you want the right people listed in the will so you don’t go through the situation Grandma had to deal with.
So that’s it. That is the lesson of the day. Again, my name is Maritess. If you have a young person in your life, or you know someone about to go to college and they need to have something written down, definitely give us a call and we’ll take care of that. Have a great day, thanks for watching.
[Music]
