Who would handle your parents' finances if they couldn't? Who would make their healthcare decisions? Most families know they should ask. Many don't, until a crisis makes the decision for them.

Holidays, family dinners and quiet visits are some of the best chances we get to talk about a power of attorney and a personal or healthcare directive. Most of us still don't bring it up. Nobody wants to spoil a nice visit, so it gets left for next time.

In this episode and article, I talk about the conversation so many adult children keep putting off, and why it's worth having while everyone's still well. Whether you're watching a parent age, or you're a parent who'd rather make these decisions yourself, this episode is for you.

Read the full article.

Helpful tools:
Who Speaks for You?™: https://agapimarketing.com/who-speaks-for-you/
Your Voice Your Care™: https://agapimarketing.com/your-voice-your-care/
In Good Hands™: https://agapimarketing.com/in-good-hands/

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

You named your daughter as executor. She's organized, she's fair, and her brothers trust her completely. She's also lived in Phoenix for eleven years, and nobody thought to ask what that would mean.

In this week's episode I look at what happens when the person named to settle an estate lives somewhere other than where the estate will be settled: What a Canadian court asks of them before they can act. Where the line gets drawn, province by province and territory by territory, and why it isn't drawn in the same place everywhere. How Quebec approaches the same question under the Civil Code. And the tax question sitting underneath it all, which is where the estate itself is considered to be managed once the person making the decisions is making them from another country.

None of this means you can't name the person you trust most. It means you should name them knowing what you're handing them. The article closes with the options that are actually open to you, and the conversation worth having before anything gets signed.

Read the full article.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.

Three months into settling her mother's estate, Alison sat looking at a line on her own checklist that said "CPP death benefit," and couldn't tell whether she'd done it or not.

She had every reason to think it was handled. The funeral home had taken care of so much in those first days that she'd stopped tracking which agencies still needed something from her.

In this episode I'm covering what changed with the CPP death benefit on January 1, 2025, and why the new maximum reaches far fewer estates than the headlines suggest. Two people in the same family, with nearly the same work history, can leave estates that receive very different amounts, and the reason has nothing to do with how much either of them paid in.

I also get into the 60 day rule. Nearly everything written about this calls it a deadline for claiming the money, and that isn't what the legislation says. The difference matters a great deal if you're already past it.

And in the article I talk about the piece of paperwork families assume the funeral home filed, where Quebec's rules go their own way, and why $5,000 is never really $5,000 by the time it reaches anybody.

All is in the full article.

Disclaimer: This content is for general information only and is not legal, financial, medical, or tax advice.