I find that some of the things I’m focusing on this month with health and EOL are not really about retirement so much as the end of retirement aka death. End of life as I know it. The great dirt nap. And my legal analysis is pretty tied to that too.

I don’t have much that I need to do on the legal side to retire. There is ONE thing on my list, and it is part of finance more so than legal, but it has a legal component. The basic question is whether or not I’ll generate any income streams in my retirement. That could be from writing, consulting, YouTube opera singing, whatever. And so there is a component in there for legal…do I have the legal instruments in place that would let me do what I want to do, if I so choose.

For example, on the simplest side, if I decide to be a consultant, it would be good if I had a business entity to charge things under, could even link up with my brother who already has a nice little company sitting there waiting for me to join perhaps. He’s asked before, and my answer is generally no. I don’t think I want to do that when I retire. But when I talk about some of my activities in retirement, you’ll see that there are a couple of small structural issues to my writing where a corporate entity and contractual arrangements might actually facilitate things a bit more than me being Joe Retiree. I’ll need to talk to a tax accountant at some point and ask their advice, maybe a tax lawyer instead. Anyway, it’s on my list.

I’ve already talked about funeral plans, and that is as much practical finance as it is law and stuff. But of course the biggest links are actual legal instruments that facilitate all of it.

First and foremost, I need to revisit our power of attorney for property (finances, etc.). Andrea and I can do most things for each other, but in the event we need to, we have someone in the family designated. We should revisit with them to make sure they are still willing to do that, but I don’t anticipate any issues for the next five years or so. But maybe they don’t want the responsibility any more.

Second, there is the power of attorney for personal care. This one gets tricky. Ideally, the PoA(PC) would be in the same city, so that in the event of something happening at a hospital, boom, they can be there. Sounds great. And generally I have Andrea and potentially in the long run Jacob. But all of my siblings are out of the city, with one being an obvious choice (at least to me). They might say no, though, if I was to ask, there are no guarantees, and these issues can push people in strange ways easily. So I need a backup for Andrea and to confirm with them. I suspect they’ll be okay, it’s a tertiary responsibility, but still need to ask, obviously.

Third, there is our will. At first glance, there are no issues. Everything goes to Andrea, or then to Jacob. Easy peasy. But the challenge is what happens after that, if they’re both gone too (it was a strange owl attack, the Ministry of Magic is still looking into it). When we first drafted our wills back in 2008, the lawyer called it the “catastrophic loss” scenario — if everyone is gone, then what? The more polite term these days is “failure of gifts”, i.e., if all the attempts to give listed above were thwarted, then what? In 2008, I spent a lot of time on that clause. Trying to balance things out between families, descendants, etc.

In 2024, it needs to be updated, or more accurately, **should** be updated. One of the “shockproof” things we put in the original was that in the event of one of our catastrophic loss groups preceding us in death, their share would go to a named charity. And two of the named people have died — my mom and my brother Don. So I wanted to update for that reason alone, but as we looked at it, I realized that I had been far too anal about the various categories. I hate to say it but I almost feel like I was planning a wedding…did I want to invite my cousin that I hadn’t seen in 10 years? What about strange Aunt Mildred who I hadn’t seen in 20 years? Or more pointedly in will planning, if I had rich relatives, should any of the money go to them? It’s a crappy set of variables, to be honest. How close am I to person X? How much do I care if they get a few dollars after I’m gone? Do they even need it? Or do I just ignore all of that hogwash and give it to someone we love a lot? In all likelihood, it’s moot…it’ll just go to Andrea and then Jacob. But we still have to have something there. And, as I’ve gotten 16 years older, I feel a bit differently about the size of the wedding and whether it should perhaps just be a small intimate affair with a few key people and a charity or three.

I don’t know the answer to those questions yet, but I want to update all of the legal stuff in the next three months. It’s just time, or at least that’s what I feel after my brother’s death—a desire to ensure that my affairs are in order, I guess.

I mentioned in an earlier post, that I’m completing open to organ donation, anyone can harvest whatever they want. I view it as recyclable material. If there’s a use, great! Whatever’s left can get burned up, probably…I actually don’t know what has to happen to legalize the organ donation, and I won’t be surprised if there’s nothing worth harvesting. My body is far from a temple.

I also have something small that I’m tracking, but I don’t know where it goes. Is it a “legal” issue, not really a finance issue necessarily, maybe a little of everything? I’m talking about a list of online accounts with their passwords, particularly for anything that needs to be cancelled for billing purposes. There are a lot of online forms that people and organizations have shared to help figure all that out, so I’ll likely curate a good one of my own (I almost never settle for someone else’s curation, sigh).

And finally, there’s an outstanding legal obligation that I feel I have, even though I likely won’t accomplish anything on it for some time. When my mother died, I was co-executor of the estate. And I ended up with most of the photos from the house. My intent is to scan them and share them with everyone as a memento. I started, got sidetracked, lost some files, blah blah blah. No one cares, no is asking for them, but I feel it is an outstanding legal obligation that I have. And I want to ensure I complete the scanning during my first year of retirement as a project. When I have the time to actually sit down at a regular schedule and scan 100 photos or whatever until I’m done.

That’s all I have for now, on to the big question…finances.

If you can think of other legal issues, let me know!