Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: you have more options than the obvious one, and the worst answer is leaving it blank. An unfilled seat does not stay empty — it gets filled by a court, with someone the court picks.
The options, honestly ranked
- A younger friend, a niece or nephew, a godchild. Ask directly and describe the actual work. People agree far more often than expected, and the awkwardness of asking is smaller than the consequence of not.
- Two people with different jobs. Splitting financial and health-care roles between two people is often easier to say yes to than one person doing everything, and it builds in a second pair of eyes.
- A professional fiduciary — a paid, unrelated individual whose occupation this is. What that means, and how the regulation differs by state.
- An institution for the money roles. Banks and trust companies act as trustee and executor for a published fee. The actual schedules.
- Your attorney or accountant, where their rules allow it. Ask about the conflict where the person who drafts the document is also paid to administer it.
Always name a successor. Always.
This is the failure that matters most for someone without family, and it is invisible until it happens. A document whose only named agent has died, moved away or declined is a document that does nothing — and the fallback is exactly the court process the document was written to avoid.
Name a first choice, a second, and if you can a third. Institutions are useful in the last slot precisely because they do not die.
What to actually ask someone
- Describe the work: paying bills, dealing with insurers, talking to doctors, possibly for years.
- Say whether it is paid. It is allowed to be, and paying a friend fairly is often better than relying on goodwill indefinitely.
- Tell them where the documents are and who the other professionals are.
- Ask again in five years. Circumstances change and people are allowed to change their minds — better then than at the moment of need.
Two practical warnings
An agent under a power of attorney is not accepted everywhere. Banks refuse valid documents routinely, and the statutes have real remedies. The deadlines and the attorney-fee remedy.
And Social Security will not accept it at all. If benefits are involved that is a separate application entirely. Why SSA recognises no power of attorney.
What happens if the seat stays empty.
If the document itself is what is missing
Naming someone only works if the power of attorney exists and is executed properly. LawDepot builds a state-specific durable power of attorney under your own state’s witnessing and notary rules. Where the arrangement is complex or an institution will serve, a lawyer is the better route.
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General information drawn from IRS, Medicare, HUD and state statute and regulation, not legal, tax or financial advice. Continuing-care law is state law and differs materially between states; every figure here is year-labelled and every source named. Fiduciary licensing, executor compensation and intestacy are STATE law and differ materially between states. Fee figures are quoted from published schedules on the dates stated and change without notice; nothing here is a substitute for advice on your own facts.