I am a pretty anal, type-A sort of person about a lot of things in my life. I love spreadsheets and lists and having my ducks in a row… (though nottypea has brought it to my attention that perhaps I am more like her and actually have “Type A aspirations and Type B execution – almost always with disastrous results.” 🙂
This brings me to my failure to get a family will drawn up. I mean, where do you start? Do I create one online for cheap? Should we hire a lawyer? Who could/should/would raise our kid(s) if something awful happened to us?
So many questions, and since they’re ones I hope never to answer, I guess I’ve just buried my head in the sand thus far. Now that there are both a mortgage and a child in my life though, I guess it’s time to put my big girl panties on and deal with this! I’ll start off by answering the PAIL prompts:
- Do you have a will? When did you draw it up and what sorts of things did you decide on with regard to guardianship?
- No, we don’t have a will. This is definitely getting moved up on the priority list though. Stella has two sets of Godparents – Charlie’s brother and his wife, and my sister and her husband. Honestly, both would be great guardians, so I’m not too worried about this particular part of the process. I guess we should have the conversation though about who should actually be designated as guardians and make sure that they’re on board with that. Hm…
- Where do you live? Are you in a house you hope to stay in for years? A city you’re desperate to escape? Are you farther than you’d like to be from family (or, ahem, too close for comfort)?
- We bought our house about 3 years ago, but I’m not sure what we’ll do long term. It’s only 1,400 sq. ft. – and it was a 2bed+loft until Charlie turned the loft into a nursery for Stella. Right now, we are in the upstairs bedroom across the stairway landing from Stella, and the downstairs master we use as a guest room. I guess moving or not will depend on if we have any more children. For now, we like where we’re at, and it works for us. However, we’re not sure if Charlie’s parents will stay here forever, and my parents live 1,100 miles away, so if we end up here without family close, I’d be more inclined to move to a larger city. Right now we live in a town with a population of < 1000. Ya, it’s small. I’d love to live closer to Denver for job opportunity and travel reasons. My husband would prefer Phoenix. Ew. So far, we’re staying put here in rural Colorado!
- Does the size of your world match your family’s needs (ie, do you need a bigger car or a house with an additional bedroom if you have another child)?
- Nope! If we get blessed with a 2nd child, we definitely want a bigger car (we love the Acadia), and probably a bigger house, or at least an addition on the one we have. Both the house and the car were bought pre-Stella when we weren’t even sure we would be able to have ONE child, let alone two. I suppose the IFer side of me is afraid of “sizing up” until/if there’s actually a second child in my arms though.
- What about the details, like “my sister would be the guardian for our son but she has no idea what he likes to eat for breakfast”?
- I’m actually not worried about this at all. We are blessed to both have really close, loving families, and since love is the main need and Stella would have plenty of that – I truly believe the rest would fall into place.
- Do you have other safety nets in place, like life insurance?
- Yep! We both bought policies around the time we got married. If I remember right, we have 500k policies on each of us (enough that if one of us died, it would pay off the mortgage plus cover basic living expenses for awhile), though now that I’m writing this, I’m thinking I need to check that Stella is next in line after the spouse as beneficiary. I suppose she is by default?
So ya, basically, we have life insurance taken care of (bam!) and great options for guardians for Stella (bam!)… but it would be smart of us to get a will drawn up to make it easier in the case of the worst case scenario for those who have to deal with our affairs.
I’m super curious what other people have done on this. Are we the only ones who have procrastinated on planning ahead, especially when it comes to a will?
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This is my contribution to PAIL’s Monthly Theme post topic for February, “Planning Ahead.”
Click here to join in, if just to read everyone else’s thoughts on this topic!