Who Speaks for You If You Cannot?

Estate planning gets filed under things that matter after you die. The documents families actually reach for work while the person is still very much alive.

A stroke on a Tuesday, a fall on the stairs, surgery that runs longer than anyone expected. You are alive. You just cannot sign anything, and it turns out neither can anyone else.

Marriage does not come with authority

Your spouse cannot walk into the bank and move money out of an account with only your name on it. The bank is not being awkward. Your spouse has not been given legal authority over your property, and marriage alone does not grant that authority.

The document that does is a durable financial power of attorney. Durable is the word carrying the weight. It means the authority survives the moment you can no longer make your own decisions. That is exactly when it is needed.

Without one, the route runs through the probate court, under Georgia's conservatorship statute, O.C.G.A. § 29-5-1. A filing, a court-ordered evaluation, a hearing, a judge, and in practice a lawyer. Weeks at best. The mortgage is still due the whole time.

The hospital is allowed to talk to your family, but it does not have to

Under the federal privacy rule, a provider may share details with family involved in your care. May, not must. With nothing in writing, plenty of providers default to no. A nurse at two in the morning is not going to take that chance.

A HIPAA authorization is one page naming who is allowed to be told. It is the least expensive document in the set and the one that gets the least attention.

Somebody has to say what you would have wanted

Georgia folded the living will and the healthcare power of attorney into a single form back in 2007. The Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care names your health care agent. It also records what you want done if you are terminally ill or permanently unconscious. Two witnesses, or it means nothing.

Every state has its own version. Cross a state line and this is the one most likely to need redoing. Worth knowing if you signed something in another state a decade ago and then moved here for work.

How many households have these

Trust & Will surveyed 5,000 adults in early 2026. It found 56% hold none of the five core documents. Those are a will, a trust, a financial power of attorney, a medical power of attorney, and a HIPAA authorization. In the same survey, 73% said estate planning mattered to them.

That gap is not laziness. These are dull documents about a day you would rather not picture. No week ever makes them feel urgent. Then there is one week where they are the only thing that matters, and by then they cannot be signed.

Where to start from nothing

Start with the financial power of attorney. Its absence costs the most and takes the longest to fix. Then the healthcare directive, then the HIPAA page, which is about five minutes of work.

Then tell the people you named. A document your family cannot find is a document that does not help at the front desk. Scan them, leave a copy where your family can find it, and tell your agent where it lives.

If a parent of yours has none of this, have that talk at the kitchen table. Not in a hospital corridor.

If you would like help working out which of these you actually need, send me a note.