Preparing Your Power of Attorney

PREPARING YOUR LAST WILL & TESTAMENT AND RELATED DOCUMENTS.

THE POWER OF ATTORNEY

Legal experts nationally agree that an estate plan is not complete without an appropriate General Durable Power of Attorney in place. The lack of a proper and effective Power of Attorney could have a devastating effect on your family’s personal finances and could cost your loved ones thousands of dollars in legal fees and court delays. To illustrate, if you became physically or mentally incapacitated, your spouse is not automatically authorized to handle financial or legal transactions on your behalf. He/she would need to get a Court Order.

If you do not have a Power of Attorney most basic personal tasks could remain unaccomplished, such as paying rent or mortgage or depositing funds made payable to you. If your loved ones are forced to seek judicial approval to manage your affairs, Court actions require you to be examined by two (2) independent physicians who report your incapacities to the Court, which will then determine if your affairs can be managed by the person seeking to do so. Such Court involvement could take months; requires a formal Court hearing; depletes valuable family resources for payment of medical and expert fees, legal fees, court fees, and other costs. In the interim, your affairs could be deteriorating as no one is empowered to attend to them.

A Power of Attorney allows you to designate an individual (referred to as your “Attorney-in-Fact”) who is empowered to handle all of your personal affairs, including your finances, in the event you become unable to manage your personal affairs and finances yourself. A Power of Attorney enables your designee to do any one or more of the following:

Pay your bills
Collect monies due to you
Deposit your paycheck, social security check, pension payment, disability or other funds on your behalf
Buy or sell real estate on your behalf
Transfer assets or otherwise make gifts to your loved ones, to reduce your taxable estate
Manage your financial and personal affairs
Essentially do anything you could do yourself

A Power of Attorney can be as broad or limited in scope as you desire. The Attorney-in-Fact can be given complete and absolute power over everything (General Durable Power of Attorney) or limited power only over certain things, such as selling a particular property (Limited Power of Attorney.)

This questionnaire is being provided here on our website for your convenience.
You will need to print this questionnaire, answer all questions completely and mail this to our office in order for you to provide us the information necessary to advise you appropriately regarding your estate plan and in order for us to accurately prepare your Last Will & Testament and related documents.
Alternately, you may copy and paste this entire page into your email client (Verizon, Comcast, MSN, etc.,) fill in the blanks and email the completed questionnaire to our office at jmadamslaw@comcast.net
If you are married, both you and your spouse should each have Living Wills prepared.
Our fees for preparation of wills and related documents are dependent on the number of documents and extensiveness of each. Fees can range from $295.00 to $2,000.00. Please call or email us for an estimate to prepare your specific documents.
OR you may call our office and we will mail you a hard copy to complete and return.

To have us prepare a legal Power of Attorney for you, please provide the complete name, address, and social security number of the proposed Attorney-in-Fact (and designate an Alternate in the event your original choice is unwilling or unable to act for any reason.)

ATTORNEY-IN-FACT ALTERNATE ATTORNEY-IN-FACT

NAME________________________________ NAME_______________________________________

ADDRESS____________________________ ADDRESS____________________________________

_____________________________________ _____________________________________________

RELATIONSHIP________________________ RELATIONSHIP_________________________________

SOCIAL SECURITY #____________________ SOCIAL SECURITY #_____________________________

PHONE #_____________________________ PHONE#_______________________________________

_________________________________ __________________________

Your Signature Today's date

Please return this completed form to our office. Thank you.

JEFFREY M. ADAMS

ATTORNEY AT LAW

609 Main Street, 2nd floor

TOMS RIVER, NJ 08753

732 281 3005 Phone

732 281 3006 Fax

EMAIL: JMADAMSLAW@COMCAST.NET

WWW.JMADAMSLAWFIRM.COM

All rights reserved. You may copy this document for your own personal use with proper credit given the author and copyright information included. You may not copy and distribute this material for commercial purposes without the express written consent of the author.