Is it too late to protect any of your life savings when you are already in a Nursing Home?
This edition of the Koldin Report E-Newsletter is the final newsletter in the series that answers the question, “Is it too late to protect any of your life savings when you are already in a Nursing Home?” In this newsletter we discuss the risks of applying for Medicaid without being represented by an Attorney. All prior newsletters are saved on our website. You can read them by clicking here.
In the previous newsletters in this series, we explained that it is still possible to save some or all of your life savings even after you are in a Nursing Home. You should never assume it is too late. There are many asset preservation options even if you are already in a Nursing Home such as:
■ Spousal Refusal
■ Purchasing Annuities
■ Promissory Notes
■ Purchasing Exempt items
■ Transferring the family home and other assets to an exempt person
■ Special Rules for Retirement Accounts
■ Fair Hearings to raise the amount of savings the at home spouse can keep
■ Purchasing a Life Estate in someone else’s home
These special asset protection options require knowledgeable legal advice. As the past newsletters in this series have shown, selecting the appropriate options to protect some or all of your life savings are complex decisions, but can be very effective and successful. However, when you do not receive advice and representation by an attorney who is knowledgeable in the Medicaid laws, you put yourself at risk of losing your entire life savings.
To make matters worse, some Nursing Homes have begun to refer their residents to non-lawyer companies to handle the Medicaid application process and this can lead to disastrous results.
These non-lawyer companies are not your advocates. They do not provide you with legal advice on how to protect some or all of your life savings. The job of these companies is to monitor the spending away of your life savings on your Nursing Home bills down to the Medicaid eligibility levels ($14,850 for a single person in 2016) and then handling the Medicaid application process on your behalf.
Nursing home patients and their families are told it is too late to protect any of the life savings because they did not plan at least 5 years in advance. This is not true. There is something you can do.
When the Koldin Law Center, P.C. handles a Medicaid case, we not only handle the entire application process, but we also review asset protection options with our clients. We review with our clients who are already in a Nursing Home options to protect some or all of their assets beyond merely establishing Medicaid eligibility.
There is something you can do.
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We have been told by many clients who are in a crisis that they wish they had known about our firm much sooner. We are proud of the many families we have helped in times of crisis.
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We all share the responsibility for making our family and friends aware of the planning options available to them.
Your referral to the could make a major difference in the lives of your family and friends if they are someday faced with a long term illness.
Remember that the offers many services for clients of all ages. Our services range from basic estate planning such as a simple will to complex estate planning including asset preservation planning.
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