September is National Preparedness Month, which usually brings reminders about emergency kits, evacuation routes, medications, food, water, and what to take with you if you have to leave home quickly.
Those things matter, especially here in California. Wildfires, earthquakes, power outages, and other emergencies do not usually give us the luxury of getting organized after they happen.
But there is another part of emergency preparedness that does not get nearly as much attention: your estate plan.
Imagine you receive an evacuation alert and have 20 minutes to leave your home. You grab your medications, your laptop, your dog, a few clothes, and the things you know you cannot replace. Then something happens while you are away. You are injured, hospitalized, or temporarily unable to make decisions for yourself.
Would the people you chose know what to do?
Could someone speak with your doctors? Could another person handle your finances if bills still needed to be paid? Could your successor trustee step in if necessary? Would anyone know where your estate planning documents are, or would everyone assume the originals are somewhere in a binder inside the house you just evacuated?
Emergency preparedness and estate planning have more in common than most people realize. Both are about making decisions before a crisis so the people you love are not forced to figure everything out while the crisis is happening.
An Emergency Estate Plan Is About More Than What Happens When You Die
One of the biggest misconceptions about estate planning is that it is primarily about death. A good estate plan also addresses what happens if you are very much alive but temporarily or permanently unable to manage things yourself.
That is where your advance health care directive and financial power of attorney become so important.
Your California advance health care directive allows you to name someone to make health care decisions for you if you cannot communicate or make those decisions yourself. It also gives you the opportunity to provide guidance about the care you would want.
Your financial power of attorney serves a different purpose. Depending on how it is drafted, it can give someone you trust authority to handle financial matters that may need attention when you cannot handle them yourself.
That could mean dealing with a bank, paying expenses, communicating with an insurance company, handling a real estate matter, or taking care of other financial responsibilities that do not stop simply because you are in the hospital.
If you have a living trust, your successor trustee is another important part of the plan. The trustee’s authority relates to the trust and the assets it owns, while your agent under a power of attorney may have authority over other financial matters depending on the powers you granted.
These documents work together. One does not automatically replace the others.
This is also why I do not consider a revocable living trust by itself to be a complete estate plan. If incapacity occurs, your family may need several different people and documents working together.
Having the Documents Is Not Enough if Nobody Can Find Them
I have seen beautiful estate plans that would be very difficult for the family to use in an actual emergency.
The documents are signed. The binder is organized. Everything looked complete when the planning process ended. Years later, however, the children do not know where the binder is, the person named as health care agent does not remember being named, and no one knows whether the attorney has copies.
That is not the position I want a family to be in when someone is being taken to the hospital or the family has just been told to evacuate.
Your agents and successor trustees do not necessarily need copies of every estate planning document sitting in their homes. They should, however, know that they have been named, understand generally what their role will be, know whom to contact, and know how the appropriate documents can be obtained when they are needed.
That conversation is part of estate planning.
If your adult daughter is your health care agent, she should not learn that for the first time when a doctor calls her from the emergency room. If your brother is your successor trustee, he should have some idea that you selected him and know where to turn if he needs to act.
The legal document gives someone authority. Communication makes that authority usable.
Think About Access to Your Important Information Too
Your estate planning documents are only one part of the information your family may need after an emergency.
Consider what would happen if you could not go home for several days or weeks. Could you access your insurance information? Do you know your policy numbers and whom to call? Could someone find basic information about your financial accounts if you were unable to communicate?
This does not mean putting passwords, Social Security numbers, account numbers, and other sensitive information into an unprotected file called “Emergency Information” on your laptop.
Security still matters.
It does mean thinking intentionally about where important information is stored and who will be able to access it when appropriate.
The FTC currently recommends keeping important documents organized and creating secure electronic copies, including the use of strong passwords and multifactor authentication for cloud storage. That can be useful for insurance information, identification records, property information, and copies of estate planning documents.
Copies are not always substitutes for original legal documents, and some originals should remain safely stored. The point is not that your entire estate plan belongs in your evacuation bag. The point is that your plan should not become inaccessible simply because you cannot get into your house.
A secure digital copy of an advance health care directive, for example, can be very useful when a family member is trying to communicate with a hospital. Knowing where the signed original is located and how to contact the estate planning attorney gives the family another layer of support.
Your Trust Also Needs to Be Properly Funded
An emergency can expose another estate planning problem that families often do not discover until something has already happened: the trust was signed, but the assets were never properly connected to it.
Creating a living trust and funding a living trust are two different things.
If your home was supposed to be owned by your trust, was the deed actually changed? Are appropriate financial accounts titled correctly? Have assets acquired after the trust was created been reviewed? Are beneficiary designations coordinated with the overall estate plan?
Those questions matter because a successor trustee’s ability to step in depends in part on what the trust actually owns.
A beautifully drafted trust cannot manage an asset that was never properly placed under the trust’s ownership simply because everyone intended for it to be there.
This is one reason I review funding as part of the estate planning process and continue to revisit it as a client’s assets change. People refinance homes, open new accounts, buy investment property, start businesses, change financial institutions, and acquire assets years after their estate planning documents were signed.
Your estate plan needs to keep up with your life.
An emergency is a particularly bad time for your family to discover that the legal plan and the ownership of your assets no longer match.
Your Emergency Plan Should Include Your Children and Pets
Parents of minor children have another layer to think about.
If something happens to you and you cannot get home, who is authorized to care for your children right away? Who has the information they need about school, medical care, medications, allergies, schedules, and the people who should be contacted?
Long-term guardianship planning is important, but an emergency can create an immediate problem long before a court would ever be involved. Your plan needs to account for that gap.
The same practical thinking applies to pets.
CAL FIRE specifically includes pets in its wildfire evacuation planning recommendations, but planning for your pets should go beyond putting food and a leash near the door.
If you are hospitalized after an emergency, who can take your pets? Do they know the veterinarian? Can they access medications? Do they know feeding schedules or medical conditions? If you have a pet with significant medical or behavioral needs, would someone understand what is required?
Your estate plan can also address what happens to your pets if you die, including who will care for them and whether money should be available for that care. The emergency plan deals with what happens tonight. Your estate plan addresses what happens if the situation becomes permanent.
Both matter.
Do the People You Named Still Make Sense?
Emergency preparedness is also a good reason to look at the names in your existing estate plan.
Maybe your sister was the obvious choice to make health care decisions 12 years ago, but she now lives across the country and you rarely talk. Perhaps the friend you named as successor trustee has developed health problems of her own. Your children may have been teenagers when you signed your plan and are now capable adults who should have different roles.
Relationships change, and so do people’s abilities to serve.
You should also look at the order of the people you named. If your first choice cannot act, is the backup still someone you trust? Do you even remember who your backup is?
This is particularly important with older estate plans. I regularly review documents that were completely appropriate when they were signed but no longer reflect the client’s family, assets, relationships, or wishes.
There is nothing unusual about that. It is exactly why estate planning should be reviewed rather than placed on a shelf indefinitely.
Preparedness Means Your Family Knows What Happens Next
There is a meaningful difference between owning estate planning documents and having a plan that your family can actually use.
A complete emergency estate plan should answer practical questions. Who can make health care decisions? Who can handle financial matters? Who can manage the trust? Where can those people obtain the documents they need? Who knows about the children, pets, home, business, and other responsibilities that cannot simply be put on hold?
The goal is not to hand everyone in your family a binder full of private financial information.
The goal is to make sure the right people know enough to act when they are supposed to act.
That is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in Life & Legacy Planning®. I am not interested in simply preparing documents and sending clients home with a binder. I want the estate plan to work in real life, including during the moments nobody hoped would happen.
When a family has an ongoing relationship with their estate planning attorney, they also know whom to call. They are not staring at documents written years ago, trying to determine what they mean while someone they love is in a hospital.
Use National Preparedness Month to Review Your Estate Plan
You do not need to wait for an evacuation warning or another emergency to find out whether your plan is ready.
Take some time this month to look at your estate planning documents and ask yourself a few practical questions. Are your health care agent, financial agent, and successor trustee still the right people? Do they know they have been named? Is your trust properly funded? Can important documents and information be accessed if you cannot get home? Have you made appropriate plans for minor children and pets?
If your estate plan is several years old, this is also an opportunity to look beyond emergency preparedness. Your assets may have changed. Your children may be older. Your relationships may be different. Your health, business interests, property ownership, or family circumstances may no longer look anything like they did when the documents were signed.
A go bag is useful because you prepare it before you need it. Estate planning works the same way.
The real value of the plan appears when something happens and the people you love already know what to do.
As a Life & Legacy Planning® attorney, I help families create and maintain plans designed to work during incapacity as well as after death. We look at the legal documents, asset ownership, family relationships, children, pets, and the practical information the people you trust will need if they ever have to step in.
If you are not sure whether your current estate plan would actually work in an emergency, or it has been several years since you reviewed it, contact Cheever Law, APC or schedule a 15-minute introductory call. We can make sure your plan reflects your life today and that the people you love are not left trying to figure it out during a crisis.