Hey everybody, this is Bridget MacKay with MacKay Dressler Law Firm. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the hidden cost of being a daughter in an estate plan. So today we’re kind of talking to the next generation, the adult children who are helping their elderly parent or friend, neighbor, aunt, uncle. And just a little shout out, I am not excluding sons because we definitely see sons in here doing this level of caregiving and work. But more often than not, it is a daughter.
So what I’m talking about today is when an elder parent becomes incapacitated, there are certain things that need to happen. Not only do they need to deal with their estate plan, but often adult children, particularly daughters, are tapped to figure out care, maybe even provide care themselves. Meals, organize where that parent is gonna be cared for, and not only if they’re not doing the care, monitoring the care. And all of these activities do take up time, and sometimes it has a cost for your daughter and her future.
What we’ve seen over time is when this happens, a few things occur. One, if you have a daughter who’s working, oftentimes she’s going to have to reduce the amount of work she’s doing or stop working altogether to provide that care. If you have a daughter who is retired, there is a pull sometimes with them because they may also have children and grandchildren themselves that they want to spend time with. And it’s definitely another set of balancing that you need to do in that stage of life.
So I’m talking about this too, so that we can be aware when we’re creating plans or when our plans start to be used because of incapacities that we’re cognizant of this extra work that’s being put into the plan, because I get clients who want to equalize things because of this work that the daughter is doing. Some folks don’t want to at all, and for you folks, I would say take you know another look at that because it really is a cost and a stressor on that family and that daughter who is providing that level of care.
For those of you who want to equalize and really take a look at what this cost means for your daughter, you can do it a couple of ways. Oftentimes, I see clients want to give a daughter more in terms of distributions at death. So they might want to have unequal distributions to the children, which is okay to do, but I always recommend having that conversation family-wide so that the siblings who are not getting the same amount really understand why this is happening. And that, you know, their sibling or their sister is putting in more work than they are, and everybody’s okay with it.
Short of that, there is also a way to document that work and quantify it. So oftentimes we have caregiving contracts that a parent will sign with their daughter, and in that it will spell out how much time is she spending, what her time is worth, and how she’s to be compensated with that. And then at the time where that parent dies, that daughter can bring that contract to the trustee or to the estate planner, and they will essentially be a creditor, and so they will get that extra share of the estate at the time of the parent’s death.
So, just trying to point out some of the nuances that occur in an incapacity when a daughter is caring for an older parent and ways where you can still protect yourself, that child, and the rest of the family so that everything goes smoothly at both incapacity and death.
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