In this video, Paul Sydlansky, CFP® explains the importance of estate planning for parents. He breaks down the essential documents every parent should have, including wills, guardianship designations, healthcare proxies, living wills, and durable powers of attorney. Tune in to learn how these documents can help ensure your wishes are met, and your family is protected should something happen to you. 

Topics Discussed:

• What estate planning is
• Role of a will in estate planning
• Guardians, executors, and secondary designees
• Healthcare proxy and living will
• Durable power of attorney

Transcript:

Hi everybody. I’m Paul Sydlansky, and welcome to The Build our 24-part video series where we take you through what it’s like to work with Lake Road Advisors as financial planning clients. In today’s episode, we’re going to go through the high levels of estate planning and why it’s so important for you as a parent to make sure that you have all of these documents in order to protect your family. 

First off, what is estate planning? Estate planning is the process of anticipating and arranging during a person’s life for the management and disposal of that person’s estate during the person’s life, in the event the person becomes incapacitated and after death. So in layman’s terms, estate planning is just making sure that you are prepared to take care of your family, that your wishes are met, and that your assets are directed and used in a way that you want them to, if something were to happen. At Lake Road Advisors, we’re not lawyers and we’re not allowed to practice law. However, when it comes to estate planning, we can educate you and take you through the basics of what each type of document means and why they’re so important for you to have as a parent. 

The first document you need to have is the will. The will is something that most people have heard of. It’s really the primary tool for deciding ahead of time how you and your family would be cared for. Every will has an executor, and that’s the person who really carries out the instructions of the will. The executor should be somebody who’s organized and understands basic financial and legal concepts. 

The other thing that you need to make sure that you have in your will as a parent, it’s going to be the guardian designation. That’s going to be the people who take care of and raise your children if something were to happen to you. If your children are minors, you need to have guardian designation, and not only primary but secondary. So if something happened where your primary guardians were with you in an accident, who are those secondary folks? 

The next set of documents that you’re going to need to make sure you have when you go put together an estate plan are going to be your healthcare proxy, your living will, and your durable power of attorney. 

A healthcare proxy is important. Again, if you were incapacitated and someone needed to make a decision about a surgery or a procedure that you wouldn’t be able to communicate about. As with your will, your executors, your guardians, you want to have a primary healthcare proxy as well as a backup. 

The next document is your living will. Think of this as kind of the roadmap that goes along with the healthcare proxy. The living will is the document that provides the instructions about how you wanted to be taken care of if something happened to you. 

The third document that you want to make sure you have here is going to be your durable power of attorney. This is provide somebody the ability to have access to your financial accounts and to make certain transactions and financial decisions for you if you weren’t able to think about providing somebody access to a checking account to pay your bills if you were incapacitated. Again, a durable power of attorney is something that’s going to allow someone else to have access to your financial accounts if something were to happen to you and you were unable to do so. 

As a quick recap, as every parent, you should have an estate plan. You should have a set of documents that make sure that your wishes are met and protects you and your family. You’re going to need a will. You’re going to need a healthcare proxy, a living will, and also a durable power of attorney. The other thing we’ll talk about next time are trusts and why they’re so important and how they can be useful for you as a parent. If you have any questions, as always, please feel free to reach out. We’re happy to help.

Lake Road Advisors, a Fee-Only, independent financial planning firm with offices in Corning, NY, Ithaca, NY and Portland, OR works with clients virtually all across the country. Paul Sydlansky, the founder of Lake Road Advisors LLC, has worked in the financial services industry for 20+ years. Prior to founding Lake Road Advisors, Paul worked at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan for 13 years. While at Morgan Stanley, Paul was a senior-level manager within the Institutional Equities Department. In 2018 he was named to Investopedia’s Top 100 Financial Advisors list. Paul received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Marist College and holds an MBA from New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Paul is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and a member of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the XY Planning Network. They can be reached by phone at the Corning, NY office at (607) 438-2914, Ithaca, NY office at (607) 463-8400, or Portland, OR office at (607) 292-2172 or at the firm’s website at https://lakeroadadvisors.com/

The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice and it should not be relied on as such. It should not be considered a solicitation to buy or an offer to sell a security. It does not take into account any investor’s particular investment objectives, strategies, tax status or investment horizon. You should consult your attorney or tax advisor.