We received an email yesterday from a gentleman, and his query was along the above lines. While we’re always pleased to see people getting their affairs in order, it was reminder of one of the dangers of doing your Lasting Powers of Attorney (LPAs): appointing only one attorney.
Why should you appoint more than one attorney? It’s obvious: what happens if you lose your mental capacity, and that attorney dies or indeed loses their mental capacity before you die? There is no other attorney to act for you, and all the resulting problems of having no LPAs in place come to pass because you are not able to appoint new attorneys.
As such, at Lakes Wills we would never write an LPA with only one attorney.
When writing Wills and LPAs, we always consider foreseeable scenarios. One thing we like to do is to always ensure there is someone outside the immediate household who has the power to act as an executor (Wills) or attorney (LPAs), whether that be a friend, sibling, or an adult child if they are established in a different home.
If you need to write your Will or do your LPAs, and you want to avoid the common pitfalls of a DIY job, get in touch.