By Tim Barkley. June 2025.
Q: My child is headed to college. Is there anything I need to think about?
A: Your child needs financial and medical powers of attorney (“POA’s”). Even though you’re the Mom, once your child becomes an adult his or her financial and medical records are protected by privacy laws, and you can’t access them without written authorization. And if they’re injured while away at school, or traveling, you’ll need their permission to access their banking and brokerage accounts, academic records, medical records, etc.
A well-drafted POA can name multiple individuals “concurrently,” that is, both are authorized to act, but only one needs to sign paperwork, so Mom and Dad, or a parent and sibling, can be named to provide coverage if one of them is unable to act.
Q: Can you get our wills done before we leave on vacation?
A: As long as you give us about 3 weeks’ notice, we probably can. But more important than your wills might be financial and medical powers of attorney. If you are stranded away from home and need someone to tend to your affairs here, or if someone here needs to authorize a release of medical records for you while you’re gone, they need legal authorization from you. That’s a “power of attorney” or “POA” in which you delegate your authority to tend to your affairs to someone else.
Be sure your POA is immediately effective – the best POA in the world is useless if it’s only effective if you’re certified incompetent and you’re just stuck in Paris. And be sure it’s up-to-date. The laws have changed in the past seven or eight years, and the list things we must cover has grown longer in an increasingly digital universe.
We “learn by doing” in lawyering, and a 20-year-old POA won’t cover many of the things we’ve learned to handle over the intervening decades.
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Attorney Tim Barkley
The Tim Barkley Law Offices
One Park Avenue
P.O. Box 1136
Mount Airy
Maryland 21771
(301) 829-3778
Wills & Trusts | Estate Planning | Probates & Estates
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