New Hampshire now has a law that allows surrogate decision making with respect to health care issues.
The purpose of the law is to ensure that health care decisions can be made in a timely manner by a person’s next of kin or loved one without involving court action.
Basically, the new law establishes a surrogate decision maker for health care decisions when there is no valid advanced directive or guardian in place.
There are some additional things to think about with respect to the legislation as well, which you can review in our recent newsletter.
People often ask about the advantage of a revocable trust for probate avoidance.
There are several advantages. For example, when it is established and properly funded, it ensures a consistent estate plan. Too often, when people rely on designated beneficiaries and joint ownership, the result is a plan that is skewed unintentionally toward one or another beneficiary. The reason for this is that if you have multiple beneficiary designations, and you change one but forgot to change the others, you may create a different distribution than the one you had in mind.
By contrast, with a revocable trust, the change can be made once (by means of an amendment to the trust) and this will affect all assets.
Read more: http://www.curtinlawoffice.com/typical-questions.htm
