Читать книгу Powers of Attorney - Martin Shenkman - Страница 10

The more you understand about powers of attorney the better result you will achieve. Be very cautious when reading information on the Internet. If you search for “powers of attorney,” the quality of information you pull up varies dramatically. Even some well-known websites have considerable misinformation and even errors in their discussions of powers. Other sites have pretty good explanations. How can you decide which site is good? Many of the consumer legal websites, even with good information, often limit discussions to very short articles and snipets of information. The time you have available to sift through the information is most likely limited, but that doesn’t mean that the issues in planning, preparing for, creating, and using a power of attorney can adequately be explained to you in a 100 word dialogue box of explanation on a legal website. If you must prepare a power on your own because of financial constraints, then you must invest some energy (like reading this book carefully for starters) before doing so. The biggest fault with online powers of attorney is that they don’t require you to acquire a basic understanding of what the decisions you have to make are. They don’t have lists of cautions of when their documents may not serve your needs. Without this groundwork, you cannot possibly make the right decisions.

Tip: The Uniform Power of Attorney Act may provide some useful guidance: http://www.uniformlaws.org/Act.aspx?title=Power+of+Attorney.

If you understand in broad terms the real uses of powers of attorney, how they fit into your overall planning, what ancillary steps to take, and how to identify some of the particular issues that need to be tailored to your goals, you will enable yourself to choose what approach will best serve your needs.