Granting Powers of Attorney give your family members or close friends the right to assist you with your affairs if you fall ill and cannot deal with matters for yourself. If you lose capacity and have not appointed an Attorney to deal with matters on your behalf, your immediate family (who may not necessarily be the people you would have chosen) will have to apply to the Court for a Guardianship Order and this can be expensive and can take a long time to be granted.
We recommend that you appoint an Attorney while you still can!
This is a formal legal document, which states your “end of life” treatment wishes. It tells your doctors and your family what treatments you want or might not want if you became terminally ill, seriously injured, in a coma, in the late stages of dementia or near the end of life. By planning ahead you get the medical care you want. It takes the difficult decisions away from your family members!
Making a Will is one of the most important things you can do, after all it determines how your personal possessions and hard earned savings will be shared amongst your family and friends. Failure to make a Will can pose major difficulties for those left behind. If you don’t have a Will, your assets will be distributed according to The Laws of Intestacy for Scotland. Most people believe that a surviving spouse will automatically inherit everything, this is not always the case. The value of your assets, and what family survive you, determines how your assets are divided. It may be that people you would not wish to inherit from your estate do so because you didn’t make time to make a Will.