Something to think about for those of us whose pets are our children….
If you think stories of people choosing to bequeath some (or all!) of their hard-earned loot to their four-legged kids is a solely American trend, think again.
According to a new survey conducted in the U.K., close to 1.5 million Brits plan to leave money to their pets. I found this stat intriguing because my husband and I have been talking about setting up a trust for our own boys.
It all started a few months after my father’s sudden death–when we realized that we had absolutely no game plan for them. At the time, I was mired in estate issues because my dad hadn’t anticipated dying at 54, which got me thinking about how wildly unpredictable life can be at any age: What if something equally catastrophic happened to both of us? Who’d take in the boys?
By “our boys,” I mean our beloved pets, Felix and Balthazar. Ask anyone who knows me well and they’ll say that my dogs are like children to me. As I began thinking about what could happen, the more I had to acknowledge that there were few people in our lives who could truly meet our expectations as their keepers.
According to Rachel Hirschfeld, an attorney who specializes in animal law and founder of the New York County Lawyers Association’s Animal Law Committee, over 500,000 companion animals were euthanized this year because their pet owners died, moved into nursing homes or assisted-living situations, or otherwise were no longer able to care for them, and left them behind without enforceable plans. I knew we had to act.
Lost in the 21st Century 