Fiduciary Archives - Samuels Yoelin Kantor LLP

TV host and personality, Wendy Williams, has been in the news recently for her challenging health issues, marital drama, and legal woes, after a bank froze her bank accounts due to concerns about whether she needed a protective proceeding/guardianship due to her mental and physical ailments.

Her team recently revealed Ms. Williams has dementia, and rumors abound that it may be alcohol related. A new Lifetime four-part docuseries, Where is Wendy Williams, chronicles the sad tale.

Note that Ms. Williams is only 59-years old, so she likely never expected to face such cognitive challenges that require legal planning and preparation. While she did have a Power of Attorney that identified who should manage her finances, were she to be incapacitated, the court got involved and made a determination that the nominated fiduciary was not the best person suited for that job, and appointed someone else to be her guardian for financial decision making.

Other options that could have been taken to protect herself and her assets include setting up a Trust, where a successor trustee would take over, once she became incapacitated. Naming a professional third-party professional trustee, trust company or bank may have been a better option for Ms. Williams, and may have resulted in a different ruling with the court in New York.

Nobody wants to think of the worst case scenario when discussing their future, but an excellent estate planner will help you talk through your options to bring peace of mind: Plan for the worst and hope for the best!

At 67 years of age, Bruce Willis recently disclosed his diagnosis for aphasia. Aphasia is a communication disorder, with various manifestations of impairments. It can affect ones ability to understand language, including affecting speaking and writing, but aphasia does not impair one’s intelligence. This is an important factor to appreciate.

The main symptoms of aphasia include:

Trouble speaking
Struggling with finding the right term or word
Using strange or wrong words in conversation
Trouble understanding what other people say or following conversations
Writing sentences that don’t make sense or trouble expressing yourself in writing
Speaking in short sentences or phrases
Using unrecognizable words

I once had an elderly client with aphasia, and she was discriminated against as generally being entirely mentally unwell, when the truth was her intelligence was still intact, but she struggled to make her words – which had once come to her so easily – match what she had actually intended to say. Unfortunately, it was a challenge to get some medical care providers, some of her family, and the court to understand that she knew what she wanted, but we all had to sloooooooooow down to make sure she could speak her mind, and that just because she said the wrong words sometimes, it did not mean she was not capable of participating in her own advocacy.

Consider this a gentle reminder that in this fast-paced world, it is often the best strategy to slow down and show kindness, so that true understanding can occur. Accordingly, putting together your estate plan, advance health care directive, and a power of attorney, before you need it and before there are struggles, is the best plan.

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