As your parents start to get older, there are some things that you’re going to want to help them plan and prepare for about old age. If you don’t think that they have thought about or planned for their end-of-life care or what will happen after they die, it might be up to you to help them think about these things and get their ducks in a row while they are still mentally alert enough to take care of these things.
To help you in having this conversation and getting things prepared as necessary, here are three tips for helping your parents with estate planning.
Include The Family In The Conversation
While you might be the one who’s most concerned about this, if you have siblings or there are other people who have a vested interest in the life and estate of your parents, it’s best to include those people in the conversation as well.
Although this can potentially make things more complicated, especially if your parents don’t quite know what they want or are easily persuaded by others, having everyone in the family involved during this process can help you avoid issues later on. This way, everyone will know that what is being done is fair to each party and is what your parents had intended for how things will play out.
Help Them Get Their Advanced Directives In Order
To ensure that your parents’ wishes are seen through from their estate planning, you may want to help them draw up certain advanced directives about what decisions they want made for them and how they envision the end of their lives and their deaths being handled.
Some of the advanced directives that you’ll want to help your parents figure out could include things like what type of care they want, if they are in an assisted living facility, what kind of medical treatments they are comfortable with, who should have power of attorney for them, who should be making their medical decisions, if they want extraordinary measures taken to keep them alive, and more.
Get The Necessary Professional Help
While you can talk through a lot of these things preliminarily with your parents, when it comes down to it, you’re really going to want to seek the help of a professional to make sure that everything is done legally and correctly. Otherwise, the decisions that your parents have made could be called into question or fought in court by those with differing opinions. But by working with someone who does estate planning professionally, you should be able to avoid many of these issues.
If you’re wanting to assist your parents with estate planning as they get older, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you with this process.