Most estate planning conversation is about what happens after death. These two documents are about what happens while you are alive, and they are the ones families actually reach for.
Durable power of attorney
A financial power of attorney names someone to act on your behalf: pay bills, manage accounts, deal with insurers, handle property. Durable means it survives your incapacity, which is the entire point. A power of attorney that stops working when you become unable to act would be useless.
Without one, the alternative is a conservatorship: a petition to the probate court, a hearing, a judge appointing someone, and ongoing court supervision with accountings. It is expensive, public, slow, and it happens at the exact moment your family has the least capacity to deal with it.
Two choices matter in the drafting:
When it takes effect. A power of attorney can be effective immediately on signing, or only on a finding of incapacity. The second sounds safer and often is not, because it requires someone to obtain medical certification before your agent can do anything, which is a delay precisely when speed matters.
How broad it is. Powers can be general or limited to specific acts. Certain powers, including making gifts, generally have to be granted expressly rather than assumed.
Patient advocate designation
This is Michigan’s medical power of attorney. It names a patient advocate to make healthcare decisions if you cannot make them yourself, and it is where your wishes about end of life care are recorded.
Michigan has its own requirements here, including specific language if you want your advocate to be able to withhold or withdraw treatment that would allow you to die. Getting that wording wrong can leave the document unable to do the one thing it was written for.
It also covers who may see your medical information, which sounds administrative until a hospital refuses to speak to the person sitting in the waiting room.
Why these come first
If you have no plan at all and want to know what to do first, the answer is usually these two rather than a trust.
A trust matters when you die. These matter on an ordinary Tuesday when someone has a stroke. They are inexpensive, they are quick to prepare, and their absence is what forces families into the probate court while the person is still alive.