Blog

Posts Tagged ‘trust’

Health Care Directives-What’s the Difference?

Sarah Savasky
November 21, 2014

An Advance Health Care Directive (AHCD) is always part of the estate plans I create for clients, regardless of the individual’s age or health status. An AHCD lets you name another person (a health care agent) to make health care decisions for you if you are unable to make them for yourself. It also allows you to give specific instructions regarding your health care and end of life decisions, specify organ donation wishes and provide burial instructions.

A Living Will (not to be confused with a regular will or a living trust, which serve completely different purposes) is a type of health care directive. It is a legal document that allows you to indicate which treatments you do or do not want in the event that you are suffering from a terminal illness or are in a permanent vegetative state. This type of health care directive does not include naming an agent to make health care decisions for you.

Five Wishes is a health care directive that addresses your personal, emotional and spiritual needs as well as your medical wishes. It includes the following sections:

1. The person I want to make care decisions when I can’t
2. The kind of medical treatment I want or don’t want
3. How comfortable I want to be
4. How I want people to treat me
5. What I want my loved ones to know

Next week I’ll discuss Physicians Orders for Life Sustaining Treatments (POLST) and Do Not Resuscitate Orders (DNR).

You Can’t Take it With You

Sarah Savasky
June 26, 2014

We all understand that “we can’t take it with us” but determining the best way to leave our things behind can be confusing.

Both a will and a trust allow you to choose who receives your assets after you die. A will also allows you to nominate a guardian for your minor children. For most of us, the main benefit of a revocable living trust is that it avoids the expensive and time consuming process called probate (I’ll talk more about probate in my next post). For the very wealthy a trust can also avoid or minimize estate taxes. A trust also allows you to plan for your incapacity and to provide for a child with special needs after you are gone. A will can be used as a stand alone document without a trust. However, a trust is used in combination with a will. In this situation the will is sometimes referred to as a pour over will and it serves as a back up plan in the event that some or all of your assets have not been placed in your trust.

If your estate is small (under $150,000) you might not benefit form a trust, because small estates are exempt from probate, but money isn’t the only consideration that’s why it’s so important to consult with an estate planning attorney to determine which type of plan is best for you.

“The only thing you take with you when you’re gone is what you leave behind” –John Allston