Monday, July 26, 2010

The Comfort That Comes With Planning Ahead

Everybody thinks it won’t happen to them.  Or rather, everybody knows it’s going to happen to them eventually, but nobody thinks it’s going to happen tomorrow, or next week, or even next year.  The “it” of which I speak is, of course, death. It is this perceived immortality that allows so many people to put off their estate planning until it is too late. 

But today’s blog post is not a cautionary tale about a family who put off their planning and regretted it, today’s post is about the peace and relief that forethought and planning brings not just to your family, but to you as the person making the plan.

In this article in Market Watch Chuck Jaffe tells the moving story of his brother Rob, who insisted 2 years ago on creating an estate plan even though he and his wife were both healthy.  As Jaffe puts it, “While not pleasant subject matter, it was not morbid... you'd rather be drinking lemonade on the veranda, but it wasn't a sharp stick in the eye.”  However, when Rob became unexpectedly ill in May of this year the estate plan turned out to be a comfort to Rob and his family—such a comfort, according to Jaffe, that Rob “made me [Chuck] promise that I would write about him... when his time was up, because his story would help others.”

"People need to understand... how big a blessing it is to know -- when their time comes -- that they have everything in order, that they don't need to stress or worry about how things they worked their whole life for are going to turn out. ... I would not want to waste a minute of my life now having to do estate planning or worrying that I live long enough to get documents filed or whatever garbage comes with it... Focusing on death and dying while you are living, that's easy; having to focus on death when you are dying, that would be unimaginable."

In our business we frequently see how much easier it is for people to create a plan when they’re healthy, as opposed to the stress that comes with creating a plan when they are sick.  Thank you Mr. Jaffe for sharing your brother’s moving story.  We hope that your (and your brother’s) words will help motivate others to take comfort in planning ahead.