POA, Will & Living Will

[CookieRV]

We just changed our address, residence to SD from Colorado. All of our legal documents were drawn up in Colorado. We will spend most time in Colorado and Arizona. My primary concern at this time is Living Will Medical POA. I would think that document would be honored whatever location medical needs & decisions need to be made. Doing some research I read to have the Living Will Medical POA in all the states you may receive medical care. We have changed DL to SD too. We do own rental property in Colorado. We have some medical procedure coming up in Colorado next month. I guarantee we will never be spending much time in SD.

[docj]

And I've read that you shouldn't have multiple copies of a POA in existence since you can't guarantee that all of them will be identical since they will be cast in the format of different states and then there might be an argument over which one is valid. From what I can tell there isn't that great a likelihood that your documents won't be accepted by the state in which they were drawn as long as they were valid at the time they were drafted. For example, we were Maryland residents when our documents were drafted and we've used them without difficulty since we left the state. Next summer we do plan to replace them with ones drawn up in SD since it does make sense to have them in our state of residency.

 

Here's one reasonably authoritative discussion of the issue: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/will-other-states-accept-my-living-will-health-care-power-attorney.html

[Kirk W]

We just changed our address, residence to SD from Colorado. All of our legal documents were drawn up in Colorado. We will spend most time in Colorado and Arizona. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

. We do own rental property in Colorado. We have some medical procedure coming up in Colorado next month. I guarantee we will never be spending much time in SD.

I would caution you to be very careful about the time spent in CO as there have been cases of the state aggressively prosecuting people for trying to avoid their state taxes if they disagree. I didn't find any recent news reports but this one from 2008 is pretty typical of the reports that have come out of the area. You may find it helpful to read this article about the choice of a domicile from Escapee's Magazine.

[Selah]

I can only go by what our attorney said when we changed our domicile to Florida. Basically that your will and POA are only valid if they meet your official domicile requirements. We had everything redone in Florida as that is now our official domicile.

Since SD is now your domicile I would contact an attorney there and follow their advice.

Just my opinion...

[Kirk W]

I can only go by what our attorney said when we changed our domicile to Florida.

Ours in TX told is pretty much the same thing. That is also true for a will and many other legal documents. Your state of domicile is key to what is acceptable and not all have the same requirements. I suspect that most hospitals would accept a medical POA initially, but might get the legal beagles involved if the decisions were to become critical to the survival of the patient. But this is only opinion and speculation since we have not had occasion to use ours to date.

[skp51443]

Same here, we had our AZ stuff looked at when we moved to SD and there were several issues with the documents that would have been a problem for us if they were needed. A SD lawyer was able to redo them with the minimal changes needed for a very reasonable fee.

 

Check with your mail service to find what lawyer(s) they recommend, having one familiar with the RV lifestyle saves a lot of time.

[soos]

We also were told that Texas (as an example) has specific wording that must be used when writing an advanced directive, or it won't be honored.

So popular consensus seems to be to check with an attorney in your domicile state to see what the requirements are.

 

Sue