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Planning Retirement with a Cognitive Decline
When a loved one is experiencing cognitive decline, emotional and medical considerations often overshadow the financial planning that needs to happen. This is a potentially costly mistake.
When a loved one is experiencing cognitive decline, emotional and medical considerations often overshadow the financial planning that needs to happen. This is a potentially costly mistake.
What would happen if you were mentally or physically unable to take care of yourself or your day-to-day affairs? You might not be able to make sound decisions about your health or finances. You could lose the ability to pay bills, write checks, make deposits, sell assets, or otherwise conduct your affairs. Unless you’re prepared, incapacity could devastate your family, exhaust your savings and undermine your financial, tax and estate planning strategies.
When you put your assets into a Medicaid Asset Protection Trust (MAPT), Medicaid does not count those things toward the asset limit.
Long-term care, often called custodial care, is a range of services and support to meet health or personal care needs over an extended period of time. This is non-medical care provided by non-licensed caregivers.
Social Security and Medicare are social safety programs that Americans pay into during their working years through taxes.
In some states, those who are appointed ‘conservator of the estate, are those who make financial decisions. Those who are appointed ‘conservator of the person,’ handle the same issues as a ‘guardian.’
In 1987, Congress enacted the Nursing Home Reform Law. In a nutshell, the law is designed to ensure that nursing home residents are provided whatever they need to function at the highest possible level.
With Medicare covering about 1/5th of nursing home care in the U.S., elderly individuals are forced to look at alternative means to cover skilled nursing and other long-term care needs.
Sometimes, priming yourself and your loved ones can provide a starting point for the end-of-life conversation. Podcasts are a popular way for people to learn new things–why not end-of-life care options?
The disadvantages of do-it-yourself elder law estate planning are costly errors, omissions and neglecting protections.
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