Estate Planning, Wills, Wills and Estate Planning

Richard Reacts: BC SPCA recommendation on pets in wills

I just read this CTV News article from the 4th of April, BCSPCA urges pet owners to put animals in their will, and that's actually a really important conversation to have if you have pets.

The article outlines a really unfortunate situation, where a person went to the hospital and had a situation where they didn't come home.
They had made sure that there was someone looking after their pets while they were away in hospital. But they didn't have any provision for them in their estate planning, so afterwards the pets were sort of stranded.

The person who'd been looking after them temporarily just wasn't in a position to look after these seven very lovable cats.

It reminded me that there's a lot of things about our estate planning that are very important to to think about. Pets are very much like children, accepting that unlike a lot of our children, they're really unable to speak for themselves.

We work with a lot of pet owners to make specific provisions in people's wills and people's powers of attorney, with making a plan. Helping them talk through the conversations that they need to have with the people who are going to look after their pets when they are not able to for any reason.

The person who you're going to have look after the other parts of your estate, maybe even the person that you would want to look after your children, might not be the same person as the person to look after your pets.

We had a situation with a client who had some pets that they really loved, and they had a trusted person who was there to look after their affairs when they were gone. But that person had pretty severe pet allergies, so we had to plan around that to make sure that at least for that little slice of the pet's life, there was someone else in place to look after them.

You can find more information about including pets in your estate planning here.

If you have any questions about estate planning for your pets, or about your plans for yourself and your future, we'd love to help you. Contact us today to find out more about how you can secure the future for yourself, your pets, and all of your loved ones.

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