keeping your affairs in order
Live in the moment is good advice to help you manage stress, but don’t do so at the expense of a little advance planning.
Keeping your affairs in order is important at any stage in life but becomes more of a priority as you get older.
We provide a service that gives you and your family the peace of mind, so that if you become incapacitated in the future, they can step in and manage your affairs without difficulty.
Keeping your affairs in order can be as straight forward as organising your finances to make them more clear, simplifying your finances, making the day-to-day management easier, or a more detailed analysis including outlining medical requirements, ensuring key legal documents are in place, including Power Of Attorney, Living Will, Last Will and Testament etc.
We will assist in organising, locating, compiling and sourcing all key documents and will prepare a pack, outlining details of all your personal, financial and legal information and location of same.
case study
We received a call from a Edward who was starting to feel slightly overwhelmed by all his day-to-day paperwork. He had a sense that his affairs, despite the fact that he had been meticulous about managing them his entire adult life, were no longer entirely in order. Edward had never married but had a great relationship with his family and he did not wish to leave them the burden of sorting out his affairs, should something happen to him.
we got to work immediately
We visited Edward at his home and while there was quite an element of order to his paperwork, it was apparent there had been some decline in recent times. There were many files on investments and liabilities he had held over the years, but there was no clear picture of what he owened or owed.
Edward agreed that both the day-to-day paperwork, and the paperwork regarding his affairs, needed to be reviewed.
1) Day-to-day paperwork
- The first thing we did was to amalgamate Edward’s bank accounts as a number of small accounts had evolved over the years.
- We arranged for all his income including pension, dividends and rental income to be paid directly into his Bank account. The same exercise was carried out for his expenses and, in as much as was possible, we arranged for the recurring expenses to be paid by direct debit, including electricity, gas, insurances, property taxes, insurances etc..
- We set up transfer details for payments that were made sporadically so that Edward could make the payments immediately from the comfort of his own home. These included gardener, handyman, cleaner, which reduced the need for him to hold cash in the house.
- We put in a simple process of reconciling all bills received, to outgoings on a monthly basis. Edward was slightly intimidated by the online banking at the outset, but very quickly got used to it and was delighted not to have to wait for quarterly statements to reassure himself that payments had been made.
2) Organising his affairs
- We prepared a detailed schedule of assets and liabilities, including the location of relevant important documents, such as share certificates, title documents and insurance policies.
- This exercise led to a conversation about what would happen if he ever became incapacitated. We engaged a solicitor to draw up an Enduring Power of Attorney, and outlined the location of some legal documents, including Enduring Power of Attorney, Living Will and Last Will and Testament.
- We set up a schedule outlining all his key medical information including doctors names and addresses, current medication, health insurance details.
The process happened in phases to allow transactions to be confirmed. In all the process took about 12 hours spread over three separate visits to the client. A simple document was prepared summarising the overall position, which gave great peace of mind to Edward and his family.
