If you don’t already have a living will included in your estate plan, there’s no better time than right now to keep an eye out for the future.
A living will is a legal document that allows you to predetermine important decisions about your medical and end-of-life care. This document typically becomes most relevant when it is impossible for you to effectively communicate your wishes. Much like creating a living trust, establishing a living will is a cornerstone to a strong estate plan.
Benefits of a Living Will
A living will provides several important benefits. With a living will, you can:
- Refuse certain treatments
- Make decisions easy for your family
- Prevent arguments among your family members
- Avoid financial problems for your estate
- Know what your treatment outcomes are
Refuse Certain Treatments
An important reason people choose to establish a living will is to outline how they do not wish to be treated. You can use this document to indicate a DNR (do not resuscitate) order, refuse to be placed on a feeding tube, refuse to be placed on a ventilator, or refuse any of a number of other life-preserving medical intervention techniques. People use living wills to ensure their religious convictions are upheld, but many also simply want to control how far doctors should go to save their lives.
Make Decisions Easy for Your Family
A living will is important because it spares your loved ones from having to make important decisions on your behalf. Sometimes even your closest relatives aren’t aware of what you would really want when it comes to lifesaving or life-preserving medical treatments. Not knowing your wishes and deciding for you can leave them agonizing over whether or not their choices were what you would have intended.
Prevent Arguments Among Your Family Members
When you predetermine your end-of-life medical care such that family members aren’t in a position to make decisions for you, familial strife is less likely to generate over your care. It’s unfortunate but not uncommon for family members to severely disagree on how a relative should be treated if they are approaching the end of their life. Varying opinions can be rooted in differing religious beliefs or memories about how someone once said they wanted to be treated.
Avoid Financial Problems for Your Estate
Most people want to pass away with something to leave behind for their spouse, children, and other loved ones. Having a severe amount of medical debt, however, can quickly wipe out an estate. While your family won’t be left to pick up the tab, they may not get a chance to inherit anything if your medical creditors come to collect tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.
By determining the extent of your end-of-life medical treatment, you can also ensure that some very costly procedures won’t be carried out. This may be especially important if you don’t feel confident that such methods would help you survive and fulfill an enriching life afterward.
Know What Your Treatment Outcomes Are
For some people, the anxiety of not knowing what will happen to them may be the worst part of becoming so severely ill or injured. A living will can help you outline a roadmap of your outcomes for a variety of circumstances. This can help you be sure that should something you planned for comes to pass, there’s a way it will be handled by your medical care providers without any guesswork.
Do You Need Help Preparing a Living Will?
At Cali Law, our estate planning attorneys are dedicated to helping people like you predetermine some of the most important decisions during your lifetime. If you need to consider how you wish to be treated by doctors when you are incapacitated or approaching the end of your life, we can help you establish a living will to make your wishes be known.
Get the legal help you need from Cali Law today by calling (508) 252-8186 or by contacting us online.