The best person to give power of attorney to is someone you trust without reservation, who has the practical skills to do the specific job you’re handing them, and who knows your wishes well enough to carry them out when you can’t speak for yourself. That person is often a spouse or an adult child, but not always. The right choice depends on whether you’re naming an agent for financial matters, healthcare decisions, or both — and on the honest answer to whether the person you have in mind can actually do the work.
Get this choice wrong and the consequences are serious. Your agent will have legal authority to access your bank accounts, sell your property, sign contracts in your name, and in a healthcare role, make life-and-death medical decisions. Get it right and you’ve built the single most important safeguard in your estate plan: a trusted person who can act for you without a court getting involved.
The Traits That Actually Matter
The legal bar for serving as an agent is low. In most states, any competent adult can be named. No license, no certification, no training. That means the quality of your choice depends entirely on you.
Trustworthiness Comes First
This one isn’t negotiable. The most common power of attorney horror stories involve agents who were loved and trusted but couldn’t resist the temptation of unsupervised access to money. Someone with a history of financial irresponsibility, addiction issues, or dishonesty is a dangerous choice no matter how close you are to them. Affection is not the same as reliability, and your agent will be operating largely without anyone looking over their shoulder.
Financial Competence for a Financial Agent
Your financial agent doesn’t need to be a CPA. They do need to manage their own money responsibly and be comfortable paying bills, dealing with banks, managing investments, and filing tax returns. If your finances are complex — rental properties, a business, a sizable investment portfolio — pick someone who can navigate that world or who will hire professionals to help.
Willingness and Availability
Never name someone without asking first. Serving as an agent is a real commitment that can consume significant time and emotional energy, especially during a health crisis. The person needs to be willing, available, and close enough geographically to handle in-person tasks. Many financial matters can be managed remotely. Healthcare decisions and real estate transactions often cannot.
Knowledge of Your Wishes
Your agent should know what you want, not what they think is best. That means explicit conversations about your values before the document is ever needed: how aggressively you want medical treatment pursued, whether you’d rather stay in your home or move to assisted living, how you feel about spending down assets versus preserving an inheritance. The best agent in the world cannot honor wishes they’ve never heard.
The Financial Agent and the Healthcare Agent Are Often Different People
Many people reflexively name the same person for both roles. That can work. It often isn’t the strongest choice.
The skill sets are genuinely different. A financial agent needs to be organized, detail-oriented, and comfortable dealing with institutions. A healthcare agent needs to stay calm under pressure, advocate firmly with medical providers, and make hard decisions about treatment and end-of-life care. Someone who is excellent with money may freeze in a hospital room. Someone who is steady at a bedside may have no interest in reading a brokerage statement.
Splitting the roles also eases the burden on any single person. Acting as both financial and healthcare agent during a prolonged incapacity is exhausting, and burnout leads to poor decisions. If you have one person who is financially sharp and another who is emotionally steady and medically informed, naming each to the role that fits their strengths is usually the smarter play.
One practical limit: most states prohibit an owner, operator, or employee of a long-term care facility where you live from serving as your healthcare agent unless they’re a relative. The rule exists to prevent conflicts between the facility’s financial interests and your medical care.
Family, Friends, or a Professional
Most people name a spouse, an adult child, a sibling, or a close friend. These are the people who know you best and care about your wellbeing, and in most cases that’s the right instinct. But family dynamics complicate things. Naming one child over another can breed resentment. A spouse may be the obvious choice but face their own health decline at the same time you do. A sibling across the country may be trustworthy but impractical for day-to-day tasks.
When family isn’t a good fit, professional fiduciaries are worth considering. These are licensed individuals or institutions — attorneys, CPAs, banks, trust companies — who serve as agents for a fee. You trade personal relationship for objectivity, expertise, and reliable availability. The cost is real, and a professional won’t know whether you’d want to spend $50,000 on an experimental treatment unless you’ve documented that preference clearly.
Professional agents make the most sense when your estate is large enough to justify ongoing fees, when family relationships are contentious, or when no family member has the skills or proximity to serve well. A hybrid approach also works: a family member for healthcare decisions, where personal knowledge matters most, and a professional for financial management, where expertise matters most.
Should You Name Co-Agents?
You can name two or more people to serve together, and parents with multiple adult children often do this to avoid the appearance of favoritism. Co-agents come with real operational problems that catch people off guard.
If your co-agents must act jointly, meaning both must agree on every decision, a disagreement can paralyze your affairs. Urgent healthcare choices stall. Bills go unpaid. Banks are sometimes reluctant to work with multiple agents on financial transactions because of fraud concerns. If one co-agent is available and the other isn’t, nothing moves forward. If the disagreement escalates, the dispute can land in probate court, which defeats the entire point of having a power of attorney.
If you authorize co-agents to act independently, you reduce the gridlock but create an accountability gap. Each agent can make decisions without consulting the other, which means conflicting instructions can reach the same bank or doctor. Co-agents also have a duty to monitor each other, which in practice rarely happens.
In most families, the better approach is to name one primary agent and designate the other as a successor. That gives both people a role without the coordination headaches. If you still want co-agents, specify in the document whether they must act jointly or may act independently, and build in a tiebreaker.
Always Name a Successor
A power of attorney without a successor agent is a single point of failure. If your primary agent dies, becomes incapacitated, resigns, or simply refuses to serve, the document becomes a dead letter and you’re back to the outcome a POA is supposed to prevent: a court appointing someone for you.
Naming one or two successors is standard. A common structure:
- Primary agent: your most trusted person, often a spouse or adult child.
- First successor: another adult child, a sibling, or a close friend who steps in if the primary can’t serve.
- Second successor: a final safety net, sometimes a professional fiduciary or another family member.
The successor’s authority activates only when the primary can no longer serve, typically triggered by death, written resignation, incapacity certified by a physician, or refusal to act. Chains longer than three usually create more confusion than protection.
Build Guardrails Into the Document
Financial exploitation by POA agents is one of the most common forms of elder abuse, and it’s hard to detect because the agent has legal authority to access accounts. The principal is often incapacitated and unable to monitor what’s happening, and family members may not realize anything is wrong until the money is gone.
Several safeguards are worth building in regardless of how much you trust your agent:
- Require periodic accountings. Your document can require the agent to provide regular financial reports to a designated third party, such as a family member, attorney, or accountant.
- Limit gift-giving authority. Unless the document specifically authorizes gifts, your agent has no power to give away your assets. If you do include this power, cap the amount, the frequency, and the permitted recipients. Unauthorized gifts are self-dealing and can expose the agent to personal liability.
- Name a monitor. Some documents designate a separate person whose only job is to oversee the agent’s conduct and review the records.
- Choose carefully from the start. No oversight provision replaces good judgment in the initial selection.
If you later suspect your agent is abusing the authority, most states allow interested parties to petition a court to review the agent’s conduct, require an accounting, or remove the agent entirely.
One Thing a Power of Attorney Won’t Cover: the IRS
A standard power of attorney does not authorize someone to represent you before the IRS. For tax matters, the IRS requires its own form, Form 2848, and the person you name must be eligible to practice before the agency.1Internal Revenue Service. About Form 2848, Power of Attorney and Declaration of Representative That means attorneys, certified public accountants, enrolled agents, enrolled actuaries, and certain other credentialed professionals — not a family member, unless the family member holds one of those credentials.
Filing Form 2848 authorizes your representative to receive and inspect your confidential tax information, respond to IRS inquiries, and negotiate on your behalf. If you’re facing an audit, back taxes, or an estate tax issue, naming an enrolled agent or tax attorney on Form 2848 is a step separate from your general power of attorney, and worth handling at the same time you set the rest of your plan in place.