“I have always been really healthy” and “I plan to stay in my home until I die” are common refrains I hear when I meet with clients to discuss estate and long-term care planning. Unfortunately, relying on luck to plan for future circumstances can be detrimental to you and your loved ones. In recognition of St. Patrick’s Day, here are a couple of situations where expecting luck to be a sufficient estate planning or long-term care planning strategy should be reconsidered (even if you are Irish).

Luck is not the most supportive companion when you have a short or long-term health care problem arise. It cannot make health care decisions on your behalf nor can it pay your bills and transition you to a nursing home if you need long-term care when you are incapacitated. Instead, you could prepare documents such as a Health Care Proxy and Durable Power of Attorney to ensure you will receive appropriate health and financial care while you are alive, and that decisions can be made by the people you choose.

Luck plays the cards close to the vest and regularly withholds information about your date of death in advance. Your plan may be to spend all of your money while you are alive to avoid probate and minimize the need to pay estate taxes, but luck may have different plans in mind for you. You can outsmart luck by creating one or more Trusts to avoid probate, reduce estate taxes (and increase your beneficiaries’ inheritance, too), and protect assets from liability for long-term care expenses.

While luck may come to the rescue in some situations, relying on it to take care of you and your loved ones’ health and financial well-being is not a plan. Instead, make sure you are prepared by working with an experienced estate planning attorney to create the appropriate documents in case luck decides to abandon you in the future.

© 2023 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC

Attorney Suzanne Sayward discusses The Slayer Rule, for our Smart Counsel for Lunch Series. Please watch and if you have any questions or want to learn more please call us at 781 461-1020.

It seems like almost every week there is a new type of technology or social media platform out there for us to try. Many of us have expanded our online footprint, especially as the world has changed in these past couple of years and our use of “digital assets” (such as social media, email, online photos, and document storage), has increased dramatically.  The importance of the assets stored online has also changed – perhaps this is the only place you now store vacation photos or maybe you only receive your bank or investment account statements online instead of in the mail. Your online footprint continues to grow as technology expands, and with that growth comes the need for your estate plan to address your digital assets and provide powers to your fiduciaries as needed. To the extent your online accounts contain information that you would like someone to be able to access after your death or incapacity, it is necessary to provide the appropriate authority for such access, as well as instructions about what you want done with these digital assets. 

For some types of digital assets, estate planning strategies are especially important to prevent financial loss. For digital assets such as a domain name used for business purposes or online content you created, it is important your fiduciary has express authority to access and manage these assets if you become incapacitated or after you pass away. In addition, for digital assets such as online accounts, your fiduciary needs authority to make bill payments and access investment account information. Estate planning strategies are also essential to allow access to valuable digital assets (such as bitcoin or an author’s manuscript that is stored electronically). Here are 5 tips to manage your digital assets using a combination of technology and proactive estate planning.

1. Review the terms of service agreements for the online accounts you use. Take note of the terms those agreements provide about access, and if and how others can be given permission to access your account. 
2. Outline your wishes. You should list your intentions for each asset or account, such as whether an account should be deleted immediately or archived for a certain period of time, or how an asset with monetary value should be distributed or maintained. 
3. If an online entity offers a way for you to give permission or access to your digital assets stored with that company, use their directions to set up online access to those specific accounts. For example, Facebook allows you to designate a “Legacy Contact”, who can either manage your account or delete the account once you pass away. Google allows you to control what happens to your account through their “Inactive Account Manager” option. Through Google, you can designate when your account will be considered inactive and what should happen to your Google account if inactive. You can also designate one or more people who will have access to whatever portions of your Google account you choose.
4. Update your estate plan documents, specifically your Power of Attorney, Will, and Trust, to ensure those documents grant express permission for the fiduciaries named in those documents to access your digital assets, as well as express direction regarding what should be done with specific digital assets at death.
5. Keep a current list of your usernames and passwords in an online password manager or recorded in another way where a trusted person can access this information if needed, and let that person know where this information is located. At our practice, we provide our clients with a Digital Assets Memorandum that can be used to record access information and instructions about digital assets.

If you would like to learn more about digital assets and estate planning or would like to create an estate plan that includes digital asset provisions, please call us to schedule an appointment with one of our experienced attorneys. 

March, 2023

© 2023 Samuel, Sayward & Baler LLC