TRADITIONALLY, LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES planning includes planning for housing, living arrangements, education, employment, transportation, long-term services, and other social objectives. Life circumstances planning is the most important early step because it will determine the overall setting in which the life plan will be implemented. For example, choosing to live in an isolated, rural area will certainly challenge efforts to obtain necessary personal services and transportation. Choosing any type of housing that has architectural barriers may itself impede independence and accentuate disability. On the other hand, accessible housing on reliable public transportation lines in a metropolitan area may be difficult to find as well as expensive.
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Location and housing type will, in turn, dictate the price and availability of various forms of long-term services, as well as educational and employment opportunities. Moreover, the cost of almost every element of the life plan will be strongly influenced by the location and type of residence you select. The ideal housing location will allow you to take advantage of educational, community, and employment opportunities that meet your personal goals, and afford you access to all the long-term services you need (and can afford) in case of severe illness or disability.
Perhaps the best way to perform this life circumstances planning is to construct a letter of intent. This informal document is a way to communicate important information about yourself to individuals who might provide care for you or exercise judgment on your behalf in the future. A letter of intent encourages you to sit down and think about what you want for yourself. Although it is not legally binding, a letter of intent is a useful document. It should include information about you, your family members, other relationships, advocates, medical history and care, housing, religious values, other systems of values, final arrangements, education, daily living skills, work life, government or private benefits available, hobbies and interests, and anything else that comprises an important personal life factor.
The letter of intent serves as the core of the life circumstances planning process, and provides important information regarding necessary or available types and amounts of financial resources for both the financial and estate planning processes. Before a person with a disability begins working up a financial or estate plan, he or she is well advised to complete a thorough life circumstances plan and make decisions about housing, transportation, education, and other social circumstances.
Planning For Advocacy And Directives
BECAUSE THE PLANNING process requires preparation for the worst-case scenario, a person with a disability must squarely face the possibility of catastrophic long-term illness and disability. It is this possibility that requires consideration of the issue of legal incompetence.
Every competent adult has the legal right to make decisions about his or her own medical care, including the decision to accept or refuse that care. Sometimes illness interferes with a person's ability to exercise that legal right. This occurs, for example, when a person becomes too cognitively impaired to make competent decisions. As a result, the person who is judged legally incompetent can no longer carry out his or her personal wishes.
Unfortunately, this may occur at precisely the moment when those wishes would need to be followed because of the effects of illness. Under these circumstances, the person does not actually lose the right to make a decision; rather, the ability to carry out those wishes is lost due to legal incapacity to make the relevant decisions. To make matters even more difficult, healthcare providers need not abide by the decisions of an individual who has been judged legally incompetent if those decisions conflict with the healthcare provider's own judgment.
The way to enforce your wishes about medical care decisions, even in the event that you become legally incompetent to make those decisions, is to make them ahead of time and place them in a set of legally enforceable "advance directives." Doing so preserves your legal ability to carry out your wishes as stated in the advance directive, even after you are incapacitated. If you have a legally enforceable advance directive, healthcare providers must be directed by those wishes whether or not they agree with them. To find out more, you can check out Planning For Advocates Multiple Sclerosis Patient.