Joan Rivers teaches lesson about termination of life support

Lawyers and other advisors who work in estate planning will always urge their clients to set up three main planning documents. Those are the will, the Power of Attorney (dealing with property and finances) and a Health Care Directive. Some clients need more, of course, such as a family trust or an estate freeze, but all of us need at least the three main planning documents.

I often find that people feel the health care directive (also known as Personal Directive or Health Care Proxy) to be the least important of the three documents. They generally feel that they are too young and/or too healthy to need one yet. I find this to be false logic, as I firmly believe that health care directives are not just for older people. Anyone can be the victim of an accident.

In any event, I would like to emphasize the importance of having a health care directive in place as an essential part of everyone's estate planning. Recently I read a very good article on The Probate Lawyer Blog that I'd like to share with you. It talks about the late Joan Rivers, and how her forethought in estate planning saved her daughter the pain, expense, and delay of having to go to court to obtain the right to follow her mother's end-of-life wishes. Click here to read it.

The attached photo of Joan Rivers accompanied the article at www.probatelawyerblog.com.