Meaningful Estate Planning – More on Text Boxes

Here’s another example of story based planning. This time, Carole was very interested in finding and selecting a “care manager.” This also was inserted directly into her trust as a “text box.” It didn’t come directly from any story or stories, but it did result from the learning we all obtained from all of her stories.


She said:


Our trust provides for the involvement of an outside person we call a Care Manager.  We recognize the strong possibility that we both will be alive for a number of years beyond our ability to make our own decisions and see to our own care.


We think of a Care Manager as someone who will spend time understanding us and what is best for us. At a minimum, our Care Manager needs to understand the systems, be someone we would trust completely, and who is very interested in us as persons. There could well be a separate Care Manager for each of us. 


In Article Four of this trust we have tried to address that time to come in our lives. We see the use of an official Care Manager as a significant addition to those bare provisions.  The Care Manager should be an independent person, who is either particularly trained or has the experiential skills to evaluate our needs, to assess our emotional and psychological circumstances and to assist in finding the very right personnel to meet those needs.  We would expect the Care Manager to be intimately involved with our trustees and to provide input into budgets and distribution plans, and to provide a bridge between our family, our medical team and our financial team and who will undertake and find a good care agency and then monitor the plans or programs carefully.


Finding a person who has the caring attitude we need for this very personal position, and the willingness to enjoy the work and being in relationship with us is more important than the person’s credentialed qualifications.  


We have a friend, and this is by way of example, who could be a very good Care Manager if the need were today. Her name is Samantha. Our son, Sean, knows Samantha, so we would hope that Sean would use Samantha as an example in Sean’s search for our Care Manager.