Hi Lee Phillips again and I want to talk to you for two seconds about conservatorships versus
guardianships or conservators versus guardians or however you want to say it they are an individual
they can be the same individual or they can be two separate individuals but they're basically
dealing with a person who is incompetent legally in the definition of the court or as a child
somebody who can't act for themselves legally so the court generally declares that this person is
incompetent they can't manage their own physical needs they can't manage their own monetary needs
and so they will appoint a guardian conservator and like I say often it's the same person but it
doesn't need to be. M y first introduction to conservators and guardians was when I was
brand new as a lawyer that was a long time ago and we had an individual the dad had died and
the agent the insurance agent had made the kids the beneficiaries of the life insurance policy
well they're underage and the insurance policy says time out we ain't paying any money out until
we get a conservator named for these kids and i'm going okay conservator yeah yeah yeah guardian no
you need a guardian no basically the difference is the guardian is the guy who takes care of the the
physical needs of the individual sees to their medical care sees to their their housing and
and their body. Conservator is a guy who takes care of the money and that might be a different
person than the guardian. You can separate those two functions or you can put them together
but guardian is basically has control over the guy's body and the conservator has control over
the guy's estate or his or her money and like I say the conservator guardian is usually named
by the court it's usually the probate division of the court that names the guardian conservator and
you might notice that all the courts in your county your state all of these places they
have this big division of the court called the probate court and then they have another division
that they call a civil or the criminal or whatever it is division of the court but
it's astounding to me that we have a whole court system set up for this probate stuff
so we get the guardian named they take care of the body of the guy
the physical needs we get the conservator named they take care of the financial the estate
the physical assets of the individual and that's generally the definition between guardian
conservator now we're going to throw in another one and this is another YouTube for you okay
I'm going to talk about the difference between guardians, conservators
and agents in a power of attorney and we have this concept called the durable power of attorney and I
have YouTubes on that but it allows someone to stand in and take over and take charge
and we don't have to go to court we don't have to deal with this probate court crap so
guardian conservator court appointed usually although your parents are considered guardians
for their kids when they need a guardian and that's going to be the the child's parents
or I could I took my grandkids on a cruise a couple of years ago and they were minors under
age and I had to go get a paper that said that I was their guardian during this period that
we were on the cruise so when we had to present that to the cruise people before we could take
the kids on the cruise and all this and the other stuff so guardian can be a short term appointment
but minor children legally can't handle their own physical or their physical affairs or
their financial affairs so they have mom and dad basically is guardian conservator
and sometimes we can appoint grandpa as the guardian of the kids during a period
and that means I have control over these kids, their body, their medical care, everything else
while I'm on the cruise so this is Lee Phillips talking about guardians versus conservators