Is your family equipped to handle an emergency when you are incapacitated?

One needs to prepare for the worst and keep checking if you have done enough to ensure that your family can ride through a nightmare or at least make that journey a little easier.

As personal finance professionals, when we look at customers, we are accustomed to looking out for risks which can play out and finding ways to mitigate them. This could be in various ways such as insurance, adequate investments and ensuring inflation doesn’t play havoc on well-laid plans, etc. We hope that a family which had given adequate thought to many of the above aspects would be able to manage well in any unforeseen emergency. We have now realised one important factor which we have not been emphasising, through a recent unfortunate experience.

One of our extended family members is a single father to a teenage boy, doing his under-graduation. The two of them live with his aged parents. One afternoon, while working from home, he fell unconscious suddenly and was rushed to the nearest hospital by his son.

The doctors advised that it was a case of a brain stroke with severe internal bleeding that needed surgery immediately. The son understood how grave the situation was and consented to the surgery. While he knew that his father had health insurance, he had no idea about the details of the same.
Considering the urgency of the situation, he reached out to a few friends and was able to pay the deposit and go in for emergency surgery. The hospital needed the PAN card of his father for admission formalities, which the son didn’t have. He was understandably very worried and anxious knowing that the hospital stay was bound to be a long haul considering the seriousness of the surgery.

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With a critical illness, there is no telling how long his father would take to get back to some semblance of normalcy. The boy did not know much about the investments and had no way of accessing the money which was lying in the father’s account. He did not know the net banking password or ATM pin.

When we met the son, a couple of days post the surgery, he had tasked a friend to search for the physical health insurance copy at his home, since he had been at the hospital nearly all the time in the previous 72 hours. Luckily, he had the password to his father’s email and we were able to go through his emails to trace his policy and premium paid receipts. The son also had access to his father’s phone through fingerprint lock, and we asked him to reach out to his father’s CA, whose name he vaguely remembered, to retrieve a copy of the PAN card, post which the insurance kicked in at the hospital.

Communication is essential

While we all plan for our dependents post our demise, rarely do we think of us being in a situation where we are temporarily incapacitated and are dependent on our family to take charge.

In my case, being a mother of two college-going kids, while we (my spouse and I) have had numerous conversations with them on our finances and our financial plan, we have never told them how to react in a situation like this – the people they could reach out to, etc.

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While we have a document mentioning key people, where our insurance is kept, etc, that is in a file which is on our computers. In an emergency like the one above, they are also going to be scrambling for passwords and logging into computers. We never thought of making insurance policies accessible. There are many ways to do it, but we never gave it a thought since we were under the impression that they would need all of it only when we were not around.

Every such encounter makes us think, and in this case, these are some of the conclusions we have come to.

· This is a situation which can happen to any of us. I know most of you are thinking that the situation was bad because he was a single parent, in most cases the spouse will take charge. That is partially true, what we notice though is that in most instances in the case of a couple, one of them takes the lead and is on top of the situation. They have the total picture and know exactly what is to be done, while the other has a very vague idea of things. Agreed, in this case, both will have access to bank accounts and cash flow may not be a problem however that alone will not suffice. Therefore, this is not something which is only meant for single parents and individuals, there is a lot to take away for couples as well. When we are at it, giving serious thought to this is non-negotiable if you are single.

Medical record

You may already have a document, giving every major and minor detail of your finances and the emergency contact persons, to be accessed post your demise. If you don’t, do it today. While this is a good starting point, this will not suffice. Every member of your family including your children who are 15+ years should know about your health insurance and have access to it, as well as to the emergency contact person in case of an emergency. This is not confidential info like your bank passwords, there is no reason not to discuss it. The mode which you choose to keep people informed may be different. You could put it in a shared folder on the cloud. You could make it a yearly affair to forward a mail with a clear subject “my renewed insurance and contact numbers” every year. When your children are young, you should consider forwarding this to a family member like your sibling or a close family friend.

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· Not only your finances, you need to make a note of all the current medications you are on. If you have some lifestyle illness, details of when you go diagnosed, history of medication and contact details of doctors need to be noted. If you have any allergies, they need to be mentioned as well. Basically, imagine that you are giving your medical history to your doctor before your surgery and mentioning all relevant details.

Legal provisions

· If you have a personal finance professional helping you, be sure to introduce them to your family. Ensure that their contacts are available in everyone’s phone book. Also, give serious thought to who would handle your finances in case you are incapacitated and make legal provisions for the same.

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While we hope for the best, one needs to also prepare for the worst and keep checking if you have done enough to ensure that your family can ride through a nightmare or at least make that journey a little easier.