A power of attorney is authority to act, and it ends when the giver dies

What the instrument does, and what it does not

A power of attorney is a document by which one person authorises another to act on their behalf. It is worth being precise about the effect, because the language people use around it is loose. It does not transfer ownership of anything, it does not make the attorney responsible for the giver’s debts, and it does not remove the giver’s own ability to act while they still can.

What it creates is authority. The attorney can deal with third parties — banks, agencies, buyers — and those third parties can rely on the appointment when accepting instructions. Everything the attorney does within the authority is done for the giver and binds the giver, which is precisely why the choice of person matters more than the choice of form.

Ordinary and enduring forms solve different problems

The older form of the instrument is a practical convenience: someone is abroad, or unwell, or simply wants a professional to handle a transaction, and they appoint an agent to do it. In most systems that kind of authority ends automatically if the giver loses the ability to make their own decisions, on the logic that an agent cannot have more authority than the principal who granted it.

That produced the exact gap people needed filled, since incapacity is the situation in which help is most needed. Legal systems responded with a durable or enduring form, designed to survive the loss of capacity, usually hedged with additional formalities and supervision. What these are called, how they are made and how far they extend varies enormously, and some jurisdictions divide them by subject matter, separating decisions about property and money from decisions about health and welfare.

The attorney acts for the giver, not for the family

This is the point most often misunderstood, and it causes real harm. An attorney is a fiduciary. Their obligation runs to the person who appointed them, and their duty is to act in that person’s interests, keep the money separate, keep records, and avoid situations where their own interest conflicts with the role.

So an attorney who begins distributing assets early to reduce a future tax bill, or who lends to a relative, or who uses the funds for household expenses shared with the giver, may be acting outside the authority even where the whole family agrees and nobody feels wronged. Gifts are the classic trap, and many systems restrict them tightly or require approval from a supervising body. Good intentions are not the test.

Registration and safeguards exist because of the obvious risk

Handing one person control of another person’s finances at the moment they become least able to supervise it is an arrangement with an evident vulnerability. Systems have addressed it in different ways: registration with a public office before the power can be used, notification to named relatives, certification by a professional that the giver understood what they were signing, requirements for two attorneys to act together, or supervision with a power to investigate complaints.

These safeguards create friction, and the friction is the point. They also mean the instrument frequently cannot be created quickly. That is the practical reason for the standard advice to put one in place well before it is needed, since the alternative once capacity is gone is generally a court appointment, which is slower, more expensive and more intrusive than the document would have been.

Death is a hard boundary

The authority ends on death, and it ends completely. From that moment nothing the attorney does is authorised, whatever the practical convenience. Accounts operated afterwards, payments made, property dealt with — all of it sits outside the power, and the fact that the same person is also named as executor in the will does not bridge the gap, because an executor’s authority arises from the will and the estate process rather than from the power.

People fall into this innocently, usually while paying a funeral bill or settling a utility account in the days after a death. The safer course is to stop using the authority immediately, notify the institutions, and take advice on how the estate should be handled. Explaining a well-meant payment afterwards is considerably more work than pausing for a week.

Where this varies, which is nearly all of it

The forms available, the formalities required, whether registration is needed, what an attorney may and may not do, how the arrangement is supervised, and whether a document made in one country is recognised in another all differ substantially. Cross-border recognition is a particular difficulty for anyone with assets or family in more than one jurisdiction.

This is a description of a mechanism and not advice about your circumstances, which will turn on facts an article cannot know. Anyone making one, or acting under one, should take advice from a qualified lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction. And do it early: capacity can be lost suddenly, the document generally cannot be made afterwards, and where a dispute about an attorney’s conduct arises, claims to recover misapplied funds carry time limits of their own.