Help your family to look after you
A Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) is something that anybody can make at any time, and arguably everyone should have one. It puts somebody in charge of decisions about your health and/or finances if you lose mental capacity.
Property and Financial Affairs LPA
A Property and Financial Affairs LPA allows your appointed person(s) to make decisions and carry out actions for you like:
- Paying your mortgage and bills
- Selling your home
- Arranging repairs
For this type of LPA, you can choose whether it becomes active on registration, or only if you lose capacity to make decisions for yourself.
Health and Welfare LPA
A Health and Welfare LPA is put in place to make decisions about:
- Your medical treatment
- The care you receive
- Where you live
You can choose to have both LPAs in place if you want, or just one or the other.
The Health and Welfare LPA only becomes active if you lose capacity.
Save a world of hassle
I know that it may seem scary to relinquish control of some of these decisions about your life. But it really is a good idea to have an LPA in place. It’s only ever activated if you don’t have the mental capacity to make decisions anymore.
If you don’t have an LPA in place, and you lose mental capacity, then it creates a load of extra work for your loved ones. They will need to instruct a solicitor to apply to the Court of Protection to get a Deputyship order to manage your affairs. This is a long and expensive process.
They might have to dig around for the information they need about details of your bank accounts and which bills need to be paid when too.
All in all, everything is much more straightforward if you’ve thought about it in advance, and your attorneys have the authority to step in if you need them to.