Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,55

not want your wicker furniture. Your 22-year-old tablet-toting grandson may not want your massive row of encyclopedias. Someone who secretly felt like your career or your hobbies kept you away from home too often may not want objects related to your career or your hobbies.

Or maybe they just don’t have the room for it! Remember: They only have the space they have. When they take on too much of someone else’s stuff, they can’t live their lives fully, either.

Fill Out Your Legal Documents

As you pass through the different stages that require you to downsize, the essentials of your life that you want to protect will change dramatically. In your early twenties, maybe you just have a car and a cat. Maybe you’ll get married in the following years and need to provide for your spouse. For a period during your life, you may have kids at home. Along the way, you may pick up a bigger home, a vacation cottage, investments, expensive toys, and grandkids. At all of these times, you also have yourself to think about.

If you get too sick to communicate your needs, you’ll want some way to tell your loved ones and your doctors how to take care of you. If you disappear from the picture, you’ll want a way to distribute your stuff to the people you care about.

The best way to do this is by maintaining the proper legally valid documents. It’s not enough to just create these documents once—even though that’s more than a lot of people do. You have to check in periodically to make sure they’re up-to-date and accurate. That’s because the documents you create in your twenties or thirties may not reflect your circumstances in your forties, fifties, and beyond.

Brian Caverly, a semiretired estate planning attorney in Pennsylvania and coauthor of Estate Planning for Dummies, told me that a common problem he sees is that “people will write a will and never change it. People die, they get divorced, and they become estranged from each other. This can be more of a problem than if they had died without a will.”

Given that you’re downsizing because of a big change in your life, do the details of your important documents need revision? Is a piece of official paper still floating around that specifies your life insurance or home should go to your ex-spouse if you die? Better find out!

Also, did you ever appoint someone to play an important role if you fall into a coma or die, and that person has since died or moved out of your life? Better find out!

“My recommendation is that everyone who comes into my office will leave the office with a will and a durable power of attorney, a health-care power of attorney, and a living will or some type of advanced directive,” says Larry Lehmann, an estate attorney in New Orleans who also serves as the president of the National Association of Estate Planners and Councils.

Let’s take a look at these documents.

A will. This specifies how you want your property divided after your death. If you have minor children, you can also appoint a guardian to take care of them when you’re gone.

These are extremely important choices, and you want to be the one to make them. If you don’t create a will, the law of your state will take control, and it may be different than you want for your family. If your will contains errors that render it invalid, the same situation may happen.

Another document that can distribute your property is a living trust. Depending on your needs, you may be able to use a trust instead of a will, or in addition to it. This is something to discuss with your attorney.

If you have a will, you’ll need to name an executor for it. This is the person who’s legally charged with ensuring that the directions in the will are carried out. Responsibilities include dividing up your estate like you wanted and making sure that the estate pays any bills or debts that you owed. If you create a trust, it will need a trustee, who has a similar responsibility to carry out your wishes.

Put a great deal of thought into whom you choose as your executor or trustee. This is a big, possibly time-consuming responsibility that requires some basic financial and legal knowledge.

“First thing, you need to choose someone honest and fair, who isn’t going to be carrying any grudges and using that position to get even with siblings. I’ve seen