When a loved one is facing long-term care the first concern people have when they come to us for planning is how to get the best care possible. The second concern is how to pay for it.
Getting Good Care
People come to us worried about an aging family member or friend all the time. Their primary concerns are making sure their loved one is provided for, making sure they’re safe and getting the medical care that they need, while helping them have quality of life as much as possible. And these are the primary goals for our firm as well. We want to help decrease stress, increase quality of life and preserve family relationships during the last decades of life.
Paying for Care
This is the issue that usually adds the most stress for families because they don’t know where to turn or where to get good advice about the options that are out there. The scary truth is that a lot of people are given wrong information and think there’s nothing that can be done if you can’t afford care on your own.
In reality, there are many planning tools that we can use to protect assets and gain benefits, even if someone is already in a nursing home. Our firm finds ways to maximize benefits available to pay for care, and protect some of the assets that mom hoped she would leave her family someday. Even if somebody’s been in a nursing home for months or years, it’s oftentimes not too late to get benefits to pay for care.
As long as somebody is writing personal checks to the nursing home every month, it is not too late to plan and save some of those assets.
The key is working with an experienced elder law attorney. Most “estate planning” attorneys just do what we call “death planning” (last will and testament, etc.), but elder law attorneys (like Edwards Group) have specialized training and expertise, and that means we deal with Medicaid and VA benefits every single day. We help you use the legal tools to their full advantage. And that means, in most cases, we can qualify someone for benefits faster than they ever expected, get more benefits than they ever expected, and in the end, protect much more of their life savings than they thought possible!