Or maybe the same kind, who knows. I didn’t realize when making my last post on emergency preparedness that Covid-19 would turn into quite the thing it has and that almost everyone would be interested in preparing for some sort of emergency. I do wonder if everyone knows quite what they’re preparing for. Self-quarantining for two weeks? Mass chaos? Who knows?
On a podcast I listened to this morning, one co-host suggested that everyone take this as an opportunity to do the sort of disaster preparedness they’ve been meaning to do but haven’t done yet. One example she suggested was creating a will. She said, “I have been meaning to make a will for years,” or something like that. This echoed more than one conversation I’ve had with friends recently who, like me, and like the podcast co-host, have at least one kid. The, gosh, I’ve-been-meaning-to-do-that-but-just-haven’t-gotten-around-to-it conversation. We do have a will, so each time I hear this, I say (or want to say), it’s really not that hard.
We do have a will. We finalized it in January 2019, when Gabriel was about 8 months old. It wasn’t that hard. It required:
- Emailing other new parents I knew to see if anyone had a recommendation for a lawyer to work with (only one of the five I emailed did).
- Contacting said lawyer. We had a brief, initial phone conversation about the process; an in-person meeting (both Dan and me) at lawyer’s office to go through a series of his questions; review of the document and some back-and-forth clarifying emails; and a final in-person meeting to sign the documents.
- Deciding who we would want to take care of Gabriel in the event of our untimely deaths and who we would want to be in charge of his finances, and a few other related decisions (like what age all of our assets should be made available to him). All of these are personal decisions, but they weren’t hard for us. Our lawyer was able to provide recommendations on some of them (like the age one).
- Maybe a total of 3-4 hours of time over about two months.
- $1,600. (We had pretty standard/basic arrangements set up. I believe this would be more expensive if we deviated from relatively standard arrangements.)
- That’s it.
As part of the same process, we also established advance medical directives and power of attorney for Dan and me.
There are online templates and services that help individuals set these up without working with a lawyer also. We thought of going that direction, but I think we just wanted to assurances a lawyer could give that we were doing it ‘right.’
Separately, the other thing we did to prepare for our unexpected deaths was get life insurance. We actually did this while I was pregnant. We got enough for each of us to allow Gabriel and the living parent to maintain our current lifestyle should the other parent die. I knew a lot more about the considerations and options when we were going through the process of making decisions about this. This was also a fairly painless process (though getting used to the automatic monthly debit from our account that we’ll hopefully never need to use took some getting used to), but it was eased very much by the fact that we have a financial advisor who led us through the entire process. He facilitated the quotes, presented the options, provided recommendations, did all the paperwork, complimented us on our excellent health scores from the physical exam we had to do that resulted in great rates, etc. The thought of having to figure all this out without a financial advisor does indeed sound overwhelming, but hey, people want to sell services, so hopefully it’s pretty straightforward.
I’d also like to acknowledge that I feel very privileged to have resources both to devote to this process and to protect on my son’s behalf.
Anyway, all this to say, especially if you have kids, I encourage you to take the steps to get a will and ensure your child or spouse’s financial future should you (and/or your spouse) have an unfortunate event. I really think the effort it takes to do it is MUCH less than the effort it takes to worry about it and wonder how you’ll do it. And if the Covid-19 outbreak gives you extra encouragement, well… ok.
she eats and other things 