A Power of Attorney is a legal document in which you appoint one or more people (your “attorneys”) to act on your behalf to help you make decisions or to make decisions on your behalf.

Granting a Power of Attorney gives you the power to decide who will manage your finances and make health and welfare decisions for you if you have an accident or an illness and cannot make your own decisions any more, rather than it being left to the courts to decide.  

Once registered, a Power of Attorney will allow you to give your attorneys instructions to act on your behalf regarding your financial and property matters should you decide to do so. This can sometimes be of benefit if a person were to lose physical capacity, or wanted to empower someone else to conduct business on their behalf.

Should you lose your mental faculties, then your attorneys would act on your behalf regarding your financial and property matters, whether or not they had been doing so already, and would then also be entitled to make decisions regarding your personal welfare and care since you would no longer be able to make such decisions for yourself.

Whilst it may never be needed, a Power of Attorney provides you with peace of mind that you have made arrangements for your affairs to be looked after by somebody you trust, who will act in your best interests and in accordance with your own wishes, should the need ever arise.