The 38-year-old who put off her LPA for years — and what changed her mind

A woman called us last month. Mid-thirties, mum to a couple of kids, runs her own business. The kind of person nobody assumes needs a Lasting Power of Attorney.

She told us she'd been putting it off for nearly a decade. She'd known she should do one — she'd seen what happened when her aunt had a stroke at 52 and there was nothing in place. But she'd never quite got round to it. It was always something to deal with next month.

Then a friend her age had a cycling accident. Coma. Three days. The family spent the first 48 hours not knowing whether to make decisions for him or wait, and not being told what the rules were.

She called us the following Monday.

What happened to her friend's family

We'll call the friend Dan, though that's not his name. He was 36. Fit, active, no health conditions anybody knew about. The accident happened on a Saturday morning — a car door, a wet road, a bad fall. By the time the ambulance arrived he was unconscious.

His partner, Cara, got to the hospital within the hour. The staff were kind. They told her what they knew. And then, when she started asking about what should happen next — what decisions needed making about his treatment, what the plan was — she ran into the first wall.

Cara wasn't Dan's wife. They'd been together six years, lived together, shared a mortgage. But without a Health and Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney naming her as an attorney, the hospital had limited formal obligation to involve her in decisions about his care. The team would consult her — of course they would — but in any situation where there was a dispute, or where a formal decision needed a signature, she had no legal standing to provide it.

Dan had a business. A small company, two employees, ongoing client work. Without a Property and Financial Lasting Power of Attorney in place, nobody had the authority to act on his behalf. Not Cara. Not his business partner. Nobody could sign contracts, manage the business bank account, make the payroll decisions that couldn't wait.

He was in a coma for three days. By the time he came round, the family had been holding their breath for 72 hours, not knowing what they were and weren't allowed to do, and fielding calls from his accountant and one of his clients that nobody could properly answer.

Dan recovered. He was lucky. But the family carried the memory of those 72 hours — the uncertainty, the helplessness, the feeling of not being equipped to help the person they needed most — and it didn't go away just because the outcome was good.

The story people keep not learning from

This is not an unusual story. Versions of it come to us regularly. The details vary — sometimes it's a stroke, sometimes a car accident, sometimes a sudden illness — but the shape is almost always the same. Someone is incapacitated. The people who love them most are trying to help. And they discover, at the worst possible moment, that good intentions and close relationships don't translate into legal authority.

An LPA isn't a prediction that something bad will happen. It's permission — given in advance, when you're entirely well — for someone you trust to act on your behalf if you ever can't.

The woman who called us had watched this happen to her aunt at 52. She'd understood, in the abstract, why an LPA mattered. She'd carried that knowledge for almost a decade without acting on it. And then she watched it happen again, to someone her own age, and the abstract became very concrete.

That Monday morning call wasn't panicked. It was resolved. She'd made the decision. She just wanted someone who could do it quickly.

What we did, and what she had to think about

We started that same day. One of our planners talked her through the two types of Lasting Power of Attorney — the Property and Financial LPA, which covers bank accounts, property, and financial decisions, and the Health and Welfare LPA, which covers medical treatment, care arrangements, and day-to-day welfare. She wanted both. Sensible, given what she'd seen.

The planner walked her through the attorneys section — who to name, what the difference was between joint decisions and joint and several decisions, and what a replacement attorney does and when they'd step in. She'd assumed these were straightforward questions. Some of them weren't. Her business adds a layer of complexity that a purely personal LPA doesn't have: she needed to think about what she wanted her attorney to be able to do with the business, and what constraints, if any, she wanted to include.

She'd also never thought properly about the Health and Welfare side. Most people haven't. The questions it asks — about life-sustaining treatment, about care preferences, about what matters to you if you can no longer communicate it — aren't easy. But they're far better thought through now, in a calm conversation with a planner, than left for people who love you to guess at under pressure.

The documents were drafted that afternoon. She reviewed them that evening, had one change, and we turned it round the following morning. She signed them that week, submitted to the Office of the Public Guardian, and that was that.

Who this is actually for

LPAs are associated with older people because older people are more statistically likely to need them in the near term. But the document doesn't know how old you are.

Dan was 36. The woman who called us was mid-thirties. Her aunt had her stroke at 52. All of them were the kind of person who "didn't need to worry about that yet." None of them planned for anything to happen.

If you run a business and you're incapacitated — even for a week — someone needs to be able to act. If you're in a relationship and you haven't married, your partner has no automatic legal authority over your affairs. If you have strong views about medical treatment and you've never written them down anywhere that counts, the people making decisions on your behalf are guessing.

An LPA doesn't require a diagnosis. It doesn't require a health scare. It requires only that you're over 18 and that you have things and people you care about. Most people reading this have both.

Dan has his LPA now. He did it as soon as he was well enough. The woman who called us has hers. Her aunt, unfortunately, didn't — and that's a different and harder story.

An LPA you don't need yet costs very little, takes a day with the right help, and sits quietly in the background doing nothing for years. That's the best possible outcome. That's what you're hoping for when you make one.