POA - Some advice - but also - who decides?

Malthusian

1. I had assumed that my wife would be my first attorney and my three children (all adult) would be the replacement attorneys. However, I saw a post on here advocating not having the wife as the first attorney but going straight to the children. I would like some more views on this and reasons for and against.

I haven't read that post but have no idea what this is supposed to achieve.

Generally the spouse would be the first port of call to act on your behalf, assuming the other spouse trusts them. After all, your finances are their finances - "with all my worldly goods I thee endow".

Appointing your children as your attorneys but not your spouse has the potential for a lot of problems, i.e. if your spouse relies on assets or income in your name to live on. Effectively it leaves them having to ask their own children for pocket money.

If both you and your wife had lost capacity then a POA appointing all four of you is just as good as a POA appointing the children only.

2. My parents-in-law both suffered dementia (or similar) and before they died, went through a stage where they could not be trusted to take a sensible decision but still had very strong opinions on some decisions, right or wrong. If I lose capacity slowly (or on and off) as they did, we need to get to a point where my wife manages everything and the banks etc ignore me - but not too soon! Similarly, we may get a situation where the children have to take full control and my wishes are ignored by the banks etc. How is this point determined and what is the mechanism for telling the banks to ignore me. Who decides that I have gone far enough down the slope not to be capable?

If an attorney is saying one thing and a donor is saying another then ultimately it comes down to courts and medical experts to decide whether capacity has been lost or not.

It is rare for banks or other services to be in a position where the donor is saying "do" and their attorney "don't" and they don't know who to listen to. Regulations require them to have a "vulnerable client" policy in place for situations like this. In other words, before long there would be a note on their files saying "Don't follow Mx EnglishMohican's instructions without checking with their attorneys first".

Ultimately if you insisted on instructing your bank to withdraw all your money to invest in llama farms while your attorney was telling them not to, you would have to go to the Court of Protection, persuade them you had capacity and revoke the power of attorney. Or give up.

"Too soon" is far better than "too late" in terms of when the banks start ignoring you and start listening to your attorneys instead - assuming you trust them. For as long as it's "too soon" you can just countermand them. If they were making good decisions on your behalf you would probably just let them get on with it; and if they weren't, better to find that out while you still have capacity so you can sack them and appoint new attorneys.

3. I am thinking of writing instructions into the POA so that any child can act alone for smaller amounts of money (<£1000) but for larger amounts, all three have to agree (with an additional clause in case one does not want, or is incapable of being an attorney).

As discussed above, "joint only" instead of "joint and several" is almost always a bad idea that achieves nothing except extra expense and complication, and potentially the risk of the LPA failing if one attorney can't or won't act.

If you don't trust some of your attorneys to make good decisions unless the others agree with them, don't appoint them at all. Bad attorneys don't become good attorneys if you force them to agree on all decisions. The intelligence of a group is equal to the intelligence of its stupidest member. (Hopefully yours aren't bad.)