Jeff Fouts: “Estate planning attorney, Jeff Fouts, here. Sometimes, when I talk about death, dying and disability, I realize these aren’t the most fun topics to bring up to people.
Now you may be a healthy 65-year-old person, or an extremely healthy 70-year-old, and you may think to yourself, ‘Oh, Jeff, quit being a fear monger. These things are not going to happen to me, at least not today, I’ve got plenty of time to do my estate planning.’
I want to say something to you. These issues are not simply abstract concepts. These are just not conceptual things that are never going to occur. These are real. Did you know that the mortality rate is approaching 100 percent? It is.
Medical researchers are working every day to bring down the mortality rate. But, so far, no luck. The mortality rate is still 100 percent. Now, you know I’m being a little frivolous and joking about it, but it’s true.
Not only is everyone going to die, but what about the mental incapacity rate? There’s a 50-50 chance that people in your age demographic (most of my clients are age 55+ as well) will be mentally incapacitated for some period of time.
Of course we don’t know which 50 percent of the population will be become incapacitated. You may say, ‘I hope I’m not in the 50 percent group.’, but you have no control over it.
Due to the fact that no one has control of whether they are in the 50% that becomes incapacitated or not, it is important that 100 percent of you get a high quality estate plan which properly deals with mental incapacity, because we don’t know who it’s going to happen to.
The problem is that you’re not 20 years old any more. You’re not 30 years old. You’re not 40. You’re no longer the person that used to run track in high school or college. You’re no longer the football player, or the weightlifter that used to lift your body weight, and all of those things. You’re older. You now have more years behind you than you have ahead of you.
Just understand that time goes by and life doesn’t stop, thank you.”
