Are you waiting for . . . something . . . before you go see a lawyer and do your estate plan? Our guest blogger today has a few thoughts on that subject. I hope you enjoy this tale from my husband, Billy Eli. Dylan and Griffin are our two sons with cerebral palsy and autism, Mae Dell is Billy's grandmother, and The Lovely Pamela is, well, how he refers to me.
The Importance of Not Being Falsely Optimistic, A Cautionary Tale
This past week I had to endure the almost inhumane experience of having a metric ton of paperwork concerning Dylan and Griffin, all written in legalese, explained to me.
The question being dealt with was how best to insure that the almost nothing I possess will be optimized to its maximum potential and left for the boys after I die. (I still don't know why The Lovely Pamela made me do this, I already told her I'm not ever gonna die).
She guilted me into it by turning all serious and relaying some things she's seen in her years as an attorney about what happens when false optimism takes the place of sound planning.
I don't remember any of the cautionary tales she used to get me to sit still for almost 2 whole hours, but they did remind me of a somewhat similar situation that I had heard one time.
When I was still just a kid some friend of Mae Dell’s was visiting one Saturday morning and I remember she was telling Mae Dell about a niece she had that lived in a galaxy far far away. Like maybe Pearland.
Anyway, the niece was, like, 16 and had somehow become pregnant (I know right?). Upshot of it was that she handled this in a time honored, blind optimism and or fear driven fashion. In other words, she started wearing baggier shirts and ignored it in the hope that things would sort themselves out.
So about six months farther on, when wearing baggier shirts and hoping for the best had yielded about the same results you would expect, she was forced, thru the inflexibility of biology, to go tell her parents what was happening. I didn't really pay much attention to the last details of the story, ‘cause like I said earlier it was Saturday and cartoons were on, but I do remember that hands were wrung and teeth were gnashed and ministers were called.
Thinking about this now almost forty years later I hope everything worked out for the best, and maybe it even did, but my reality meter tells me that most likely a thrown together shotgun wedding was followed by a couple of months of wedded bliss followed by the very heavy responsibility of being teenaged parents to an infant and in all likelihood that was followed by the question of who gets to keep the trailer and what amount to put on the monthly child support check.
My point in all this is that when you look back over the chain of events there were multiple chances to have a more desired outcome. False optimism or inertia inducing fear (they frequently look the same) led to the decision of no decision until the choices were pretty limited.
I doubt there is a single person over the age of about 23 who would think keeping a pregnancy a secret and hoping for the best would be a viable plan.
And yet plenty of otherwise responsible parents of special needs kids put off estate planning.
I guess it’s easy enough to do. You’re waiting until things settle down and you have time to think about it; or you’re waiting until you have enough money for it to matter; or you’re waiting until you see a financial planner; or you’re waiting until you get around to filling out the questionnaire about your bank accounts; or you can’t think of anyone to name as a guardian; or you told your sister or brother what you want to have happen when you die . . . . You have lots of time. After all you’re only (insert age here), and besides that, you’re as bulletproof as I am and you’re gonna live forever, too.
It’s too hard to think about what to do with your money and stuff, and you don’t have that much money or stuff anyway. (The longer you wait the more stuff you’re likely to have though, so if you do it now it’ll be way easier since there’s lots less things to have to decide what to do with).
But the longer you wait, the more you risk putting your child in a spot with few options that are mostly not within anyone’s control, just like the pregnant teenager. If you die without your plan written, signed and notarized, you put your child at risk of turmoil, uproar, loss of benefits, fighting family members, state-determined living arrangements, and a lesser quality of life than could have been had if you had acted when all the options were still open. Get a plan in place now - you only need to know what you need now, it can always be tweaked and changed later as needed. I'm sure as soon as I write a song that goes platinum I'll have to have my plan redone, but until then the little bit I do have will be going where I want it to go.
The pain of sitting still for two hours listening to legal stuff is way less painful to me than the thought of leaving my boys in a bad spot for the rest of their lives because I didn't just man up.
In my life experience catastrophic decisions or catastrophic results from lack of a decision are hardly ever accompanied by thunder crashes . . . it's more like a steady weight that keeps being added to and it's easy to stumble along down a narrowing hallway until you’re out of hallway with no exits and no room to turn around.
Closing your eyes and hoping for the best isn't the same thing as having a plan.
