John F. Koenig Shares a Guide for Millennials on Estate Planning

When you are a millennial, currently people between the ages of 22-37 years old, the last thing you might want to think about is planning for your retirement and beyond. But time moves much faster than you think. There are many expressions and sayings about time. Most allude to the fact that days feel like years and years feel like days. When it comes to how you will spend the last chapters, wise people know that it’s never too early to start preparing.

As a millennial, there is no end to the things that you need to save for including buying your first home and paying off student loan debt. But as a legal adult, if you acquire any assets, debt, or dependents it makes estate planning all the more necessary.

The first thing to know is that you need a legal counsel for both your financial estate and your physical end of life requests. These are not the same thing. A Power of Attorney can mean financial or medical, it doesn’t just apply to money matters. In addition to having a financial Power of attorney, having a Patient Advocate is necessary to ensure that someone will speak on your behalf when you have no voice, such as during a medical crisis. This includes adhering to all of your living will wishes. In the unfortunate event that a decision needs to be made about your living status, the Patient Advocate will speak in your name.

Once you have decided who you are going to give final decision-making to, a Last Will and Testament must be drawn up. For this, an estate planning attorney is recommended. There are many things that must be associated with a Trust, and there are plenty of mandatory documents that must be drawn up that only a professional will understand.

Since millennials are raised in the digital age, that means they will need to consider who gets possession of their digital assets. Ask questions about how you want your online presence to appear after you’re gone, and, if you want to be memorialized online, who should be in charge of it. Maybe you want to give someone your login information to an ancestry website to carry on a family tree. Your attorney should be in possession of a complete, detailed list of online usernames and passwords in order to fulfill your posthumous requests.