Hi everybody, Attorney Nicole Wipp here with the Family & Aging Law Center.
So today, I'd love to share with you a story about our client, Jane.
Jane, like so many of our clients, needed nursing home level care.
Yet, her family was so scared - because they did not know what to do, just like so many
people don't know what to do.
They had been being told, "you HAVE to do a spend down, you have to spend down her money
to $2,000 before she can receive benefits for care...she can't have two houses (which
is what she had).
She can only have one house!
You've gotta sell one!"
All of these things were being told to the family, all coming at them, right left and
center.
They didn't know what to believe.
Well, luckily, her adult son, Bill, found us, and came to us and said, "What can we
do here?
We're being told that this is what we have to do, but I feel like there's something that
I should be able to do, what can you do to help me?"
Well, what we did was we put in place a strategic - and perfectly legal, by the way - plan to
preserve some of Jane's assets.
And, by the time we were done, that $300,000 pot that Jane started with, we were able to
save $177,681.15 ...plus her house.
Now, I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of how all this works, because to be quite
honest with you, it's complicated, and you know, it isn't your job as the consumer to
understand what I as the lawyer do for every step of the way but what I will tell you is
this: that there ARE strategies that we can do to save money, and we do them every day
here in this office the Family & Aging Law Center.
All of these strategies are perfectly legal, like I said, and we can get them in place
very quickly so that you can avoid a spend down!
This doesn't mean that your loved one needs to sacrifice their level of care.
In fact, Jane - one of the big considerations that her family had was that Jane needed a
specialized type of care in the facility that not all facilities actually provide, and if
she wasn't able to stay at this particular facility, she would have ended up somewhere
that the family did not want her to be.
The other problem that Jane had, that a lot of families have, is that Jane had been giving
money to the family over the course of a couple of years prior to coming to see us.
Part of it was to help pay for her care, she had been paying her son to help care for her.
But the way that she was paying him is actually not really allowed under the law and so if
they wouldn't have come to see us Jane would have been faced with what's called a penalty.
This would have been a real problem for her, because it would have subjected her to potential
eviction from the facility that she was in if they hadn't legally straightened it out
with our office.
And so, by employing this legal strategy, by putting this thing in place to save the
money, and by doing all the things right from beginning to end, we were able to help Jane
avoid the penalty, avoid the eviction from the facility of the family's choice, and we
were also able to save a significant amount of money.
Of the $177,581.15, part of that was an additional home that she had that was out of state.
That would have been a real big hassle for the family, to have to quickly sell - in fact,
they would have been only able to sell it at a big time loss.
So, this made it able to not only save the money, but also to save the hassle of the
situation, which it was - a major hassle for everybody...just like all these are, because
nobody wants this for their loved one, and yet these are the things that we sometimes
are forced to face.
So, what we did for Jane, we can do for you as well, but you've gotta come and talk to
us, ok?
That's the big key.
There's no harm in talking to somebody that is really ready, willing, and able to help
you - and oh, by the way, can save you a lot of money in the process!
So please, if your family is facing this situation, don't sit there and try to figure it out by
yourself.
And don't listen to all this crazy stuff that everybody's telling you!
Come to a qualified elder law attorney, sit down, have a conversation, and learn your
options.
It's really the best thing for everybody involved.
Call us at (248)278-1511.