A recent study on estate planning asked people, specifically those who did not have anything in place, what would motivate them to get that done. A full 24% said that nothing would motivate them. They simply had no expectation of doing it, ever.
The rest of them would probably move forward, if they had some reason to think they were in imminent danger of dying.
I think back to when the pandemic started. The first few weeks I focused on figuring out how to get things done when I couldn’t have clients come into the office. After all, this was supposed to be “two weeks and we’ll be done,” if you remember that quaint expectation.
But after a few more weeks, when it became obvious that this was going to go on for at least some months, I started to worry. Up until then, I did public seminars about estate planning. I would send out a bunch of flyers in the local newspaper, inviting people to a meeting in a local hotel conference room, where I would explain this stuff, and then they could make appointments, if they wanted a consultation. Obviously, I couldn’t do that during the pandemic, and I started to seriously worry that without those seminars, my practice would suffer.
To my surprise, I started getting calls from people who desperately wanted to get their estate planning done, because they were worried about Covid-19. Some of them had gone to one of my seminars in the past, sometimes even years earlier, and some of them had just found me through the internet or other referrals, but they were all seriously motivated. Throughout that long period of shutdown, I was kept quite busy because people were worried about the disease.
But I probably should have expected that. Even before then, I got calls from people who were in desperate need of immediate planning. Sometimes it was a medical crisis which motivated them to finally move forward. Sometimes it was an upcoming trip. Not infrequently, the motivating factor was the unexpected death of a friend or relative, particularly one who was in their same age range.
But that first group—the ones with a medical crisis —can be a problem. It’s not too bad if, for instance, they are going through chemo or some other treatment, but likely have some time left to get things done. But when those folks are on death’s door or have an issue which impairs their abilities, that can be a big problem. I have had consultations with folks who have had a stroke or other neurological crisis, and they just aren’t able to do it. They may be legally incompetent, or they may simply be having so much trouble keeping things straight that they just can’t get across the finish line.
One of the most maddening situations is the person who has dementia, but has waited too long to be able to finalize their decisions and sign the documents. More than once I have felt like grabbing someone by the lapels and saying, “You’ve known you had these issues for a long time, why didn’t you get this done when you still could?” But of course I don’t, because that would be pointless and cruel.
Yes, they could have gotten things done when they first found out they had a bad diagnosis. But then, that fellow who dies unexpectedly from a heart attack, could have gotten his estate planning done too. Everyone can, until they can’t.
In the days when I was writing this month’s column, there were fatal crashes of a passenger jet and a helicopter over Washington DC, and a medical flight over Philadelphia. I don’t know how many of them had their estate planning in place, but I’ll bet most of them did not. And that is an added tragedy, on top of the tragedy of their deaths.
Incidentally, estate planning does not necessarily mean you have some big, complicated arrangement. An estate plan can be as simple as a will, power of attorney, and advance health care directive. But everybody ought to get something in place.
While they still can. Because the time will come when they can’t.
Now do you feel motivated?
Kenneth Kirk is an Anchorage estate planning attorney. Nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice for a specific situation; for specific advice you should consult a professional who can take all the facts into account. Sign and date, before it’s too late!
