Britney Spears has been in the news recently but not because of her music. Spears has been under a conservatorship since 2008 when she had a public meltdown. A conservatorship is where a judge appoints a guardian to take control of a person’s financial and daily activities. A conservatorship is typically issued for older people who are unable to handle their life due to their age or mental limitations. 

Due to each state having its own rules, it’s difficult to track on a national scale how many conservatorships there are. There are an estimated 1.3 million conservatorships in the U.S., according to a 2017 Justice Department analysis. The analysis also estimated that conservatorships held $50 billion in finances of the conservatees. 

In a conservatorship, the appointed guardian is in charge of all financial assets of a person. The person in the conservatorship isn’t allowed to handle their own finances, and the court decides how much, if any, money they can handle. 

“We see across the country that people get into conservatorships and guardianships that they can’t get out of,” Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told CBS News.

Conservatorships are very hard to get out of; therefore, it is vital that young people understand what it consists of and how to avoid it. As a young person, it is possible to suffer an accident that could cause you to lose some form of consciousness and force your parents to initiate a conservatorship. Also, if you grow older and find yourself unable to handle your own finances, there is also a chance that people close to you could attempt to establish a conservatorship. 

Britney Spears is having such a public conservatorship battle partly because she is famous but also because of how challenging it can be to end a conservatorship. Be cautious of what you do and how you handle your money and your life.