Really? We've reached a point where parents have so little confidence in their child-raising ability that they need to control grown men and women's financial, medical, and educational lives with a routine durable power of attorney?
Been there, done that, it wasn't pretty. I'm no fan of Vanguard, but I can understand their reasoning on this one.
You know how the military jokes that you'll have to sign over your first-born child if you lose or damage a valuable piece of equipment? When ours decided to get her NROTC scholarship, I literally had to sign our first-born over to the Navy because she was still a 17-year-old minor.
But then she turned 18. When she had a problem with Tricare, I couldn't help out because she was no longer considered to be a minor. (Her college is in a different Tricare region with a different Tricare contractor, so these were two totally different databases.) You can tell a teen all day long how to choose a physician for their health plan, but they don't really pay attention to that until they're sick. She certainly learned to appreciate the wisdom of paying attention the next time, but it would've been nice to be able to lend her a helping hand. She's a good kid and deserves help when she needs it.
When she asked questions about transferring her Roth IRA to a different custodian, we either had to talk it through on the phone or it had to wait until she was home to go through the process line-by-line instead of me calling up my Fidelity rep. She thought of a lot of good questions during the process, too, but it wasn't "real" to her until she actually had to handle the money. Imagine if Fidelity had been coaching her on her choices instead of her "trusted financial advisor". She's one of the very few people at her college with an IRA, and I include many of the "adult" residents & staff in that characterization.
When she ended up in the emergency room with a huge case of hives, luckily we were already there for the college's Families Weekend. But neither one of us was allowed to accompany her into the ER ward. However the college resident was allowed to accompany her, and she turned the job over to one of us. Our daughter was seriously freaked out (she's almost never sick) and the ER was considering tranking her to get the situation under control. Joke all you want about helicopter parents, but having one of us on the scene avoided their administering a medication to which she's allergic.
When she deployed on the USS LOUISIANA, she was out of touch for a month. (It was the first time in her life she'd been without the Internet for longer than a few days.) If any of her bill-payment arrangements had gone bad, or if her car had been vandalized, or any of her stuff had been stolen from her off-campus apartment... we wouldn't be able to help. It'd all be up to her roommates. None of them have any POA authority either.
So, yeah, maybe Vanguard's learned from their own customer's experiences that a POA is a good idea at times. It's just a permission that can be revoked by the grantor at any time, not like the guardian/conservator process. It comes in handy for singletons who haven't yet acquired a life partner to cover for them.
You save those guardian/conservator options for your OWN parents...
The nice thing about our daughter turning 18 is that we no longer receive her academic reports. (Not our problem, either-- the Navy's paying for that.) It's nice because now we're mentors & coaches instead of authority figures. She can turn to us for sympathy about a crappy test grade, but one of her motivations to study is knowing how her NROTC lieutenant would feel about her slacking off or cutting class.
