What I learned from COVID and how it can help my clients

What I learned from COVID and how it can help my clients You recently received a newsletter from me for the first time in a while about the new Medicaid home care rules and pooled trusts. As some of you know, I was out of commission for a while at the beginning of the year due to COVID. It was quite an ordeal. I initially got sick and then my partner caught it from me and he died from it. Although the grief is not finished with me and this is hard to write, I want to share some important insights with you, because COVID is still not finished with us. As we go through another surge of cases and move into the Fall, there are some things we should all be thinking about in order to avoid being blindsided if you or a family member gets sick.

We had done a will and advance directives for my partner previously. More recently, I had done his mother’s estate planning with an eye toward getting her onto the Medicaid home care program after having paid privately for care for many years. Then on December 30th , she passed away. Fortunately, we were able to get her assets into a trust and were able to avoid probate. So in January, we had begun the process of getting assets transferred to her adult children – my partner and his sister. Once this happened, we could take care of protecting the assets for him. Then, in mid-January, I became sick with COVID. Then a week later, he got COVID as well. We both got COVID pneumonia, but I did not have to be hospitalized. He did.

For some reason, even though he had all the comorbidities that lead to a bad result, we were thinking he would recover. Then they called me and told me they were moving him to ICU and putting him on the bipap machine because he wasn’t able to get enough oxygen with the nasal canula. He seemed more comfortable on the bipap, and I thought that was a good sign.

Nevertheless, with his permission, I drafted a trust for him in order to get his assets in order. I drafted a trust and then had to get the assets moved. In order to do this, I needed his Power of Attorney. Even though I had prepared it, he had put in somewhere safe, and I did not know where it was. I had to do so much scrambling – from my sick bed – to get all this done. I was sitting at my computer and on the phone with institutions constantly. This was really hard, not only because of what it was, but because I was really sick and not at all up to it. I was in a full panic, dealing with him and the hospital. Now these are the types of things I typically handle for clients, but when it came to handling for my own family, it was a different story. I can only imagine what someone who isn’t in the business would be going through.

During this scramble, the doctor told me he wasn’t improving and was headed toward needing a ventilator – and that the likelihood of morbidity at that point was greater than 90 percent. I have no idea why I was shocked to hear that. Sure enough, he did go on the ventilator and he did pass away. I was just about fever free at this point but the crying nonstop definitely hampered my own recovery. I was on antibiotics for a sinus infection two times over the next two months.

What this experience really drove home to me is something I already know: the importance of having your ducks in a row. Now, we had the advantage of already having done our estate planning documents – this is not totally a shoemaker’s kid story. Had we not, this story would have a different ending – I would be probating an estate and we would be doing all kinds of things in addition to grieving and trying to recover from COVID myself.

First lesson from COVID: Know where everything is. Know where the originals are. Often people do their will, power of attorney and health care proxy in a hurry, such a before they go into the hospital for a surgery (which was the case here a few years ago), or before they take a big trip. Maybe they leave them on the table while in the hospital or while away, and once the surgery or trip is over, they kind of forget about them and move on. Don’t do that!!

Before you leave the lawyer’s office, decide who will hold onto the originals and where that person will keep them. It you will hold onto them, decide where you will keep them – and tell your family where they are. Your attorney will typically scan the executed documents, so make sure you also receive a digital copy of them. You should have both a digital copy and the originals in a specific spot and your family should know where they are and how to access them.

In addition, you should maintain a directory setting forth where all your documents are located, all your  accounts – including retirement accounts, investment accounts, annuities. life insurance, crypto currency and any other type of assets. You should keep a digital copy and a physical copy of the directory and let your family know how to access it.

Second Lesson from COVID: Act immediately. What I’ve learned the hard way is that when something happens, there is often no warning. Life doesn’t give you a head start so you can get ready to handle a crisis. When a crisis hits, it is often unexpected. You have to be ready before the crisis hits. When my partner’s mother died at the end of December, they didn’t run out the next day and start instructing the broker on transferring the assets, getting the house appraised and the like. After all, a pillar of the family had just passed away. There’s mourning. There’s sharing the stories and the grief with others.

There’s taking a breath and trying to regroup after the ordeal that led up to her death. Who knew they’d only have three weeks to do everything that had to be done before her son died. He wasn’t even sick.

I always found it curious how when a client loses someone, the first person they call – after 911 - is the lawyer. Maybe they had already learned the lesson that I just learned in such a hard way. Well, maybe I didn’t just learn it. I’ve always been present to the fact that if someone isn’t doing well, the time to go to them or take care of something for them is now. For instance, it has always been my policy that if someone calls me and needs a will for a relative on their deathbed, to drop what I’m doing and take care of it the same day, if possible. I suppose this was a brutal reminder that when it comes to taking care of business, you should take care of matters immediately.

Third Lesson from COVID: Clean house. Many of us who are of a certain age have managed to accumulate a lot of things – many of which we haven’t wanted to part with. We have all kinds of memorabilia from our children’s childhoods – their first painting, their report cards, etc. I, for one, can’t throw any of those things away. When my daughter chides me for keeping all that stuff, I tell her that she can go through it and throw it out, but I can’t. Now, the older we get, the more losses we’ve had and the more things we end up possessing that have sentimental value. It’s hard. We all probably have some hoarding tendencies. AND, when a house has been passed down to the next generation and that next person passes, you’ll often find two lifetimes’ worth of stuff that has to be dealt with.

The same way we do our estate planning, we should do our house clean out. If we don’t do it, our kids will have to. And after we’re gone, they have to make the hard decisions we didn't want to make. Even worse, if we’re still alive but can’t take care of ourselves anymore – and the kids have to sell the house, they may end up being in a position of taking care of us, taking care of their own families, holding down a job – and cleaning out and selling our house. It’s not that difficult to find a good, reasonably priced professional organizer to help with a clean out. An organizer has experience helping us make the hard decisions on what to keep and what to let go of. Once you’ve uncluttered, it’s much easier to keep your financial and estate affairs in order. When a crisis hits, people panic. If your matters are organized, it will make a big difference to your family.