Explain the documents that protect you if you lose mental capacity or near the end of life.
If you want a say in who handles your money and your care while you are alive but unable to decide for yourself, you have to arrange it while you still can. A will can't do this job, because a will only takes effect after death.
For many families the harder time comes before death, while the person is still alive. It can follow a stroke or a fall that causes a head injury, or it can come on gradually as dementia develops over years. Bills still arrive and someone still has to make decisions about care. Singapore law gives nobody automatic authority to make those decisions for you, however close they are to you, and that includes your spouse and your children. Three tools cover this period: the Lasting Power of Attorney, the Advance Medical Directive and Advance Care Planning. These notes are general education. For advice on your own circumstances, speak to a lawyer or a doctor.
A Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) is made under the Mental Capacity Act. It lets you name one or more people, known as donees, to decide on your behalf if you lose mental capacity. While you still have capacity the document does nothing: you keep full control of your own decisions, and you can revoke it.
You can hand over two areas, separately or together. Personal welfare is about daily life, such as where you live, the care you receive and who you see. Property and affairs is about money: paying bills, running your bank accounts and investments, and handling property.
Setting one up follows a set order. First, pick one area or both. Next, choose a donee for each area. You can give money decisions to one person and welfare decisions to someone else. Add a replacement donee who takes over if your first choice can't act. If an area has more than one donee, decide whether they must agree on every decision together or may act on their own.
Most people use the standard form, where you tick the options you want and set any limits. If your affairs are more involved, for example because you own a business, a lawyer can draft a form with custom terms. Before you submit either form, a certificate issuer has to confirm that you understand the LPA and that nobody is pressuring you into it. An accredited doctor or a practising lawyer can do this. You then register the LPA with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG). The OPG website has the forms, the list of certificate issuers, the steps and the current fees.
If you lose capacity without an LPA, nobody automatically has authority over your finances or your welfare. For example, your bank will not act on your daughter's instructions just because she is your daughter. A relative who wants to act for you must apply to the Family Justice Courts to be appointed your deputy under the Mental Capacity Act.
The application needs time, money and medical reports, and your accounts may be difficult to use until it is decided. The court picks the deputy and sets the limits of their powers, and it may pick someone you would not have chosen. Unmarried partners can find it hard to be appointed at all if relatives object. Jasmine, who appears throughout the course, has a partner, Leong, and they are not married. If she had no LPA and her relatives disagreed, he could struggle to be appointed her deputy.
The same gap affects a retirement plan like the one in modules 3 to 5. That plan needs someone to make the withdrawals, refill the buckets and follow the written rules. Without an LPA, the plan stops until a court says otherwise. With an LPA, your donee can keep it running, using the rules from lesson 4.4, Write your withdrawal and refill rules, as their instructions.
An LPA covers decisions about welfare and money. Your wishes about medical treatment go into two other tools.
An Advance Medical Directive (AMD) is made under the Advance Medical Directive Act. It records that you do not want extraordinary life-sustaining treatment if you become terminally ill and unconscious and that treatment would only prolong the process of dying. You fill in the form, sign it before witnesses, one of whom must be a doctor, and register it with the Registrar of Advance Medical Directives. The Ministry of Health (MOH) website explains the form and the process. An AMD is narrow by design and applies only to that one situation.
Advance Care Planning (ACP) is wider and less formal. It is a series of conversations, often led by a trained facilitator, where you work out what matters to you, which treatments you would and would not want in different situations, where you would like to be cared for, and who should speak for you. What you decide is written into a care plan that doctors and family can refer to. ACP does not bind anyone in law the way an AMD does, but it gives the people around you specific wishes to follow. The Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) explains how to begin, and hospitals and polyclinics run facilitated sessions.
Each of the three has a separate job:
The LPA names who decides. The AMD settles one narrow medical question in law. ACP tells the decision-makers what you would want in the many situations neither the LPA nor the AMD covers.
Jasmine chooses an LPA that covers both areas. She makes Megan her donee for property and affairs, with Ryan as replacement. She picked Megan because Megan lives close by, is organised and already knows the plan. For personal welfare she appoints Megan and Leong together, either of them able to act separately, again with Ryan as replacement. Because Leong is a named donee, he has a legal voice in her care that he would not have had otherwise.
Jasmine hasn't made an AMD. She has booked an ACP session at her polyclinic and will take Megan with her, so the person most likely to speak for her hears her wishes directly. She has also given Megan a copy of her one-page withdrawal rules and told Megan where her drawdown map is saved.
A donee who has a plan to follow has to make fewer anxious guesses. You can prepare your own donee in the same three ways: hand over a copy of your written withdrawal rules, say where your drawdown map is saved, and bring them along to your ACP session.
Before the activity, think about who you would trust with your money and who with your care, whether they are the same person, and who would step in if your first choice couldn't.
Write down who you would name as your LPA donees, and whether you have recorded your medical wishes.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).