Signatory Answer Made Easy

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hello ha I am John Roth an estate planning attorney and this is just ask John where I answer your estate planning question today's question is what is a signatory this question has to do with what we call in capacity planning estate planning is generally understood to be planning for what happens to your stuff after your lifetime but a big part of estate planning is actually what happens during your lifetime if you're unable to manage your own financial affair the basic estate planning documents include maybe a power of attorney or a trust that will allow you the opportunity to appoint someone who is able to step into your shoes during your life if you're unable to manage your own affairs the most common scenarios we see include maybe someone being diagnosed with dementia where there's a gradual decline of the mental capacity another scenario is if someone gets into an accident and you either physically or mentally unable to go to the bank and write checks so some friend or family member needs to step in to their shoes and continue paying their bills paying their mortgage making sure that their financial affairs are taken care of they say that an estate planning death is easy you know you die what happens your beneficiaries get their assets but what happens during your life if you're unable to manage your own affairs having someone step in sometimes becomes more complex than any other scenario one tool that is used to allow someone to step in and help manage your affairs during your life is a signatory a signatory is someone that you can add to your bank account you go to the bank you say I want this person to have signing rights on my account they have to be there they sign their name then from that point on they have complete access to your account they can write checks they can withdraw money continue paying your bills if they need to the authority is effective immediat so the advantage of a signatory is they have immediate access to your funds the disadvantage of the signatory is that they have immediate access to your funds and so you really need to trust the person you add as a signatory if you choose to do this a signatory is not a joint owner a signatory has no ownership of what's in the account so sometimes people are hesitant to add a person as a joint owner on account because as they say when you share an asset you also share creditor instead of adding someone as a joint owner of a lot of times people will opt to add them as a signatory also when the account owner dies the signatories Authority is invalid so they can no longer continue to write checks upon the death of the bank account owner as opposed to a joint ownership when one person dies the surviving joint owner automatically becomes the owner in some scenarios a joint ownership is preferable some scenarios signatories preferable sometimes people just want to rely on the power of attorney or a trust document incapacity planning has a lot of very complex elements and there are a lot of different ways to incorporate legal documents to address general management of your affairs or very specific asset oriented tools like a signatory that can allow one person to have access to one specific account probably the account that has buns that would be necessary to continue paying your bills if you're unable to do so yourself during your lifetime so if you have any further questions please comment below or go to our website Hawaii trust law comm just ask John I am John Roth an estate planning attorney here to answer your estate planning questions thank you you