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Get Your Shit Together

getyourshittogether.org

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91–100 of 154 posts

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#91

Post by tempestn »

iamthepieman wrote: post #49
jobu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows. My guess is it struck a chord with people similar to myself - young family and minimal EOL planning. (although the snarky domain definitely helps) For us, the biggest problem has been deciding who should take care of the kids if something h…

There's no easy answer. You just gotta talk with close friends about it. Taking care of more children would be difficult for my wife and I but I would strongly consider it if we were approached by one of our friends or family members about it. Our life with 5 kids is already full but we are stable, love each other and have the resources, both emotional and financial to provide for more. We would have to change our li…

Agreed. And remember that the family taking on the kids doesn't necessarily need to be able to support them financially. Your will should designate sufficient funds to a trust account (either through your savings if you have enough, and/or through life insurance) to care for your kids through childhood. Plus ideally some extra for the people taking on this huge responsibility. Otherwise everything iamthepieman said.

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#92

Post by martin1975 »

courtewing wrote: post #13

This is great advice all around, but get a local lawyer involved to prepare your will. Even in US, there is not a single set of laws that apply to wills and power of attorney. It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work and ultimately be ending up with a document that has little legal basis. Do your loved ones a favor - hire a lawyer to do it…

Did it through RocketLawyer myself, and they have attorneys to review it as well as to guarantee it's legal in the state you live in. I also did my living will through them, all legitimate.

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#93

Post by VLM »

courtewing wrote: post #13

This is great advice all around, but get a local lawyer involved to prepare your will. Even in US, there is not a single set of laws that apply to wills and power of attorney. It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work and ultimately be ending up with a document that has little legal basis. Do your loved ones a favor - hire a lawyer to do it…

"It varies state by state. With a generic template pulled from the internet, you could just be doing a whole lot of work"

You won't be doing a "whole lot of work", but anyway, what works really well is giving a lawyer professional paperwork from another state (or whatever) and telling him to fix it for your state's laws.

They handle this kind of "translation" all the time because of people who moved in from another state, they might be a bit confused if you moved in from the state of "the internet" but it'll be less confusing than walking in with a completely blank slate. At least they'll have to ask a lot fewer questions and explain a lot fewer things. Spending money to telling a lawyer "i donno" can be very expensive compared to how cheap it is to tell him something like "I want the inheritance to work something similar to Wisconsin law"

Think by analogy of doing desktop support for a guy who can't articulate anything clearer than "the internet is broken on the hard drive", its gonna cost him a lot. But if the guy walked in with professional documentation of his specific problem, its gonna be a lot cheaper.

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#95

Post by VLM »

ersii wrote: post #74
iamthepieman wrote: post #10

I didn't see this covered under the will section but do talk to important people in your life while you are making your will. Nothing in your will should be a surprise to those that are involved in your estate after you die. If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand. If you have kids you…

If you are leaving a large asset (money, house, investments, a 500 foot yacht in the Bahamas you never told anyone about) then the person getting it should know before hand. Could you elaborate on why you should tell someone before hand that you're going to leave assets in their name? Is it just common courtesy/manners in your opinion? Or something else? I'm genuinely courageous.

They might be confusing executor issues with beneficiary issues. The cost of maintaining an extra house, until it sells, can be kinda high in some areas, for example. And there are ways of handling this in the legal system, most of which involve the beneficiaries getting much less money (starting with asking a judge to assign an expensive lawyer as executor instead of whomever). And unfortunately some folks can't really keep their stuff together by themselves when you're alive under normal conditions, so dumping executorship on them is just going to totally mess them up, they can't run one household now temporarily they have two.

Someone who's totally clueless about 500 foot yachts is just going to get screwed over either as executor or inheritor... hope at least one of them is semi-clueful about yachts, hopefully ahead of time. There are bottom feeders who look thru the legal notices in the paper and will descend on the grieving victims with absolutely ridiculous offers to take the hassle away... for pennies on the dollar, if that. Oh that classic Ferrari in perfect condition, well, I can't really offer more than scrap steel price for that, and next thing you know some poor widow gets screwed out of $100K.

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#96

Post by wglb »

tomjen3 wrote: post #68
__z wrote: post #31

I doubt these documents would be worth anything without getting notarized. Among other problems. Getting something notarized runs from free-around $2 so it's hilarious they expect you to track down two impartial witnesses but don't even mention a notary public. If you are familiar with the current pending Supreme Court case DeBoer v. Snyder (which for the Supreme Court was combined with 3 other cases) you'd know in m…

Unless you are in the complete bonies you can track down to impartial witness very quickly - your neighbors, or if you know them well their neighbors, etc.

Bonies? Not sure where that is. Perhaps you meant boonies?

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#97

Post by jimpresto »

jobu wrote: post #30
pzxc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few grammatical errors in these documents as well that do not inspire confidence. Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent. Considering the law…

> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows. My guess is it struck a chord with people similar to myself - young family and minimal EOL planning. (although the snarky domain definitely helps) For us, the biggest problem has been deciding who should take care of the kids if something h…

I'm in a similar situation and trying to make those same decisions. We ended up picking the ex-wife of a family member. Our immediate family did not fit our criteria and after we talked with her it seems like the best choice.

However, we are still struggling with how to distribute the life insurance in this case. Currently, she would get it all, but I think setting aside x% for education for each kid is worth considering (maybe y% for after college graduation). I realize someone taking in someone else's kids will incur some costs, so I think they should get 'something' - with two more kids, they may need to upgrade their house.

Thoughts on %'s or amounts?

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#98

Post by breischl »

jalons wrote: post #82
breischl wrote: post #81

I've lately been pondering how to handle the passwords piece of this. I use 1Password, which is convenient because I have a handy-dandy database of passwords, but makes it unrealistic that I'll write them all down on paper. So the problem becomes passing along that database and the master password for it. I also want to avoid giving that to anybody before I'm dead, for obvious reasons. My best plan so far is to put t…

A safety deposit box with the password to the master database? Sometimes low tech works.

I thought of that, but I don't like it for a few reasons:

1) It's cumbersome to update. I don't want to run to the bank, get the thumbdrive, update it, and take it back every time I change a password.

2) Everyone has to know that I have the box, know where it is, and know where to get the key.

3) The key could get lost or destroyed. For example, if someone slings an especially effective curse at me and I literally die in a (house) fire. You can keep the safe deposit key in a safe... but now you have to store the key for that safe, or the combination.

4) Even if they have the key, the bank still might not let my next-of-kin into the box. The bank keeps a list of who is allowed in and their signatures. You'll have to physically take every person who needs access down to the bank and add them. It's one more chore, particularly because my family lives in other states and rarely comes here to visit (we all go back to the parents' house instead). In theory a death certificate and some other documentation can overcome that, but it's going to be time consuming and annoying, during a time when they don't need one more damn thing. I'm also not sure how access is handled in case of incapacity but not death (ie, coma, sick in a foreign country, kidnapped, whatever).

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#99

Post by VLM »

breischl wrote: post #81

I've lately been pondering how to handle the passwords piece of this. I use 1Password, which is convenient because I have a handy-dandy database of passwords, but makes it unrealistic that I'll write them all down on paper. So the problem becomes passing along that database and the master password for it. I also want to avoid giving that to anybody before I'm dead, for obvious reasons. My best plan so far is to put t…

Having been thru this stuff, financial/official orgs have policies for accepting a death certificate by fax or mail. If they know your social security number, there is no need to worry a death cert is the ultimate root password to any account. So don't worry about banks / brokerages /insurance etc. Once your SS # shows up on the SSDI list they don't argue much, and that only takes a day or two, or so it seemed.

Utility/subscription type services pretty much get a copy of the certificate and they go away, maybe with a final billing statement. Look out for scammers sending fake invoices to dead people listed in obituaries or legal notice section of the paper.

Where it gets messier is non-financial institution online accounts, but they wouldn't be financially important or time critical. I remember ebay was fairly civil about the whole thing, although I don't remember what they did.

Re: Get Your Shit Together

#100

Post by galkam »

jobu wrote: post #30
pzxc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few grammatical errors in these documents as well that do not inspire confidence. Also, you better be damn sure that you can trust the person you give power of attorney to -- the document provided here assigns power of attorney immediately, not on incapacitation/death, and allows the person you designate to gift themselves up to $13,000 a year of your own property without your consent. Considering the law…

> Frankly I don't see why the HN crowd would upvote a site like this -- I'd bet it was ring votes that got it to the front page. Or maybe it was just the snarky domain, who knows. My guess is it struck a chord with people similar to myself - young family and minimal EOL planning. (although the snarky domain definitely helps) For us, the biggest problem has been deciding who should take care of the kids if something h…

+1 for the ring votes theory

Not saying it is not useful or important. It just doesn't fit the subject matter people come here to read.

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