Estate Planning
Create Your Health Care Directive in 6 Easy Steps
Creating your Health Care Directive is an important step in your estate plan. Having a Health Care Directive ensures that your medical wishes will be respected should anything happen to you. Any health complication can be an emotional time for you and for your loved ones. Having a Health Care Directive helps you let your loved ones know what you prefer so they aren’t burdened with making tough decisions on your behalf without your opinion.
At GoodTrust, we’re dedicated to making estate planning easy, accessible, and intuitive. That’s why we designed our document-creation tools to easily take you step-by-step through each section to ensure all your information is properly documented. Let’s review each of the important sections of your Health Care Directive.
1. About You
Since this is your Health Care Directive, you’ll start by providing details about yourself such as your name, birthdate, address, email address, and phone number.
2. Physician
In this section, you’ll provide information regarding your primary physician: their name, address, and phone number. You will also be able to provide an alternate physician should you like to.
3. Health Agent
Your health agent is the person you choose to make medical decisions on your behalf should anything happen to you. Here, you’ll appoint your primary health agent and your alternate health agent. You’ll also be able to provide a second alternate health agent but are not required to do so. For each health agent, you’ll provide a name, address, email address, and phone number.
In this section, you will also be prompted to indicate when you would like for your agent to acquire their duties and responsibilities. This may be at the signing of this form, after your physician determines you are no longer able to act on your behalf, or on a specific date of your choosing.
4. Wishes
This section allows you to indicate your specific wishes regarding potential medical circumstances. You will be able to indicate your end-of-life instructions, the type of care you wish to receive, your preferences in regards to organ donation, and more. Remember, drawing up your estate plan shouldn't be a solitary thing. You can always lean on your loved ones and ask them questions to help you make decisions along the way.
5. Signature
In this quick section, you’ll indicate whether you’d like to execute your advance Health Care Directive with a notary or two witnesses. Please be advised, laws regarding how to legalize your health care directive vary state by state. Find out your state by reading our article, here.
6. Review
This final section allows you to review all the information you’ve inputted throughout the Health Care Directive creation process. We recommend that you take the time to carefully read through each of your entries to make sure everything is correct and in accordance with your wishes. Once you’ve confidently reviewed your Health Care Directive, you may save it, print it and keep it in a safe location.
In order to create a robust estate plan, you'll want to consider creating the following important documents as well. Please note all of the following are included in your Estate+ plan:
Start your Health Care Directive today! Click here to begin.