Date nights should be an enjoyable experience. There should not be any underlying stress involved.

But, as parents, you know there is always that lingering thought in the back of your mind as to what would happen if something would happen to you while out on date night with your significant other.

Would the babysitter know what to do?

Is it clear who would take care of the kids until we were okay?

Would social services be called in to take care of the kids at all (and what can we do to make sure that NEVER happens)?

What we’re talking about here is how to create temporary guardians for children, and this, and more, is addressed in this episode of the #RichLifeLawyer Show.

Christopher Small wants to help you live a rich life now and leave a rich legacy when you are gone. He wants you to have your cake and eat it too. That’s what the #RichLifeLawyer Show is all about. It’s his way of helping you protect your family, create wealth right now, and establish generational wealth, for free. You’ll find information here on estate planning, financial planning, productivity, finance, self-improvement, family protection, tax avoidance, and anything else that will help improve your quality of life (and after-life). Christopher is the owner of CMS Law Firm LLC, a Seattle estate planning law firm. CMS Law Firm does three things really well: (1) estate planning; (2) probate; and (3) trust administration.

How to Create Temporary Guardians for Children Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Christopher Small and this is episode 83 of the Rich Life Lawyer Show.

I am super excited to be here with you today and to talk to you about something that is really quite important to me. I look like I’m young, I talk about this all the time, but I actually have three kids.

I have a four-year old, a two-year old and an eleven-month old, almost a two-year old. And this is something that when we first had kids, and then we would go on date nights that I would think about often.

I’m a lawyer, so I see this stuff, I see my clients going through these same things. And I would think about things a lot. And the number one thing that I would think about is what happens if I go out on a date night with my wife, and we get in a car accident and we don’t die, but something happens to us where we can’t get home for a day, or 12 hours from the hospital. Something’s going on.

Who is going to take care of our kids? What does that process look like?

Does the babysitter know what they are supposed to be doing if something like this happens?

And for most people the answer is “I have no idea what I would do, the babysitter doesn’t know what to do, the babysitter would probably call the cops.” And that is the last thing that you want to do. And so I wanted to talk about it today because there’s also an update to the law, that makes this stuff a little easier. It makes it more legal, at least.

So, let’s just back all the way up. The reason you don’t want to call the cops, or you don’t want your babysitter to call the cops, if something happens to you and you’re incapacitated for some amount of time, is that the police are under an obligation to contact social services.

It’s particularly if they don’t know who is supposed to be watching the kids. Their number one goal is to protect the kids and the way that they have been instructed, and the way that the law is set up is that social services is supposed to be that person, at least at the beginning. At least on a temporary basis.

So, you can change that by assigning a temporary guardian. And the reason I said that you can do this now is because of some changes in the law, in the past it wasn’t spelled out specifically, at least in Washington State, how you can do this.

And so, what we would do before, is clients of mine we’d create this thing called “the babysitter’s bible”. It’s basically a set of instructions that you could leave for the babysitter and you just say, “Look, if something happens, open this and follow the instructions, step one, step two, step three.”

And within those steps would be the people to call first, the people to call second, the people to call third and then some paperwork in there that we would hope would hold up if the police somehow had gotten involved, or social services somehow got involved. To be able to allow the kids to stay with the people that the parents wanted them to stay with, until that time that the parents could either get back on their feet, or other arrangements could be made.

And so we had this thing, a recent law to the law has made this better, more legitimate, I guess is the answer. And what I’m talking about is there’s been an update to the power of attorney law that now allows you to insert temporary guardian language for your kids. You can do this on a short term basis, on a long term basis, you can do this in the event of incapacity, you can do it basically for any reason that you can think of, and any time span that you can think of.

You can incorporate this into power of attorney, or you can create a stand alone power of attorney that works for this situation.

So, if your child is going out of town for a significant amount of time, if the kids are going to go stay with the grandparents for the summer, this is a great opportunity to create this power of attorney, which would give the grandparents then the ability to say, go and get medical help, if there is an accident, even if it was stitches or something like that.

This power of attorney would allow the grandparents the ability to get that medical help. And these are things that we don’t often think about, that are really critical and important, when it comes to the lives of our children.

I wanted to take this opportunity today to really speak to you about that. And let you know that A) it is possible to put something like this together; B) it’s not extremely difficult; and C) it’s extremely effective and it will allow you to put in place the people that you want to have watching your kids, if you can’t.

It’s my public service announcement to you, to think about this stuff and take care of it, don’t wait until it’s too late, because if you do, just a whole bunch of other problems that arise, it gets expensive, and it’s just not good.

I’m going to leave it on that note. If your’e interested in learning more about this, I’d love to tell you more about it. You can reach me at 206-659-1512 you can email me chris@cmslawfirm.com you can go find me on the internet anywhere, just Google me, Christopher Small and you can find me.

I hope this helps, I hope that you put this stuff together, so that your next date night can be stress free and worry free. And so that your kids can have the ultimate protection, the protection that they deserve, so that they can live the life that you want them to. Right, so that’s it for today. I will talk to you soon.