How to financially plan for if you have to go into a nursing home

Attorney Tom Olsen: Well, we talked about all the ways we can help people, but there are people out there listening right now and kind of, ''Hey, but what a minute, Tom, I own a business or I own a piece of commercial property, or I got this and I got that, I got all different kinds of assets. What about me?'' Well, Robert, you've got a great tool for them called a Medicaid assessment.

Attorney Robert Hidock: I do, and as far as I know, we're about the only law firm in the state of Florida that offers a Medicaid assessment. You would fill out a form that I give you, and we would have a conversation about-- you would list all your income, all your assets, and if you're married, all of your wife's assets and income. What we'll do is I'll create basically an assessment, a report, and I'm going to break down every single item you have. I'm going to tell you if it's accountable asset for Medicaid, if it's not accountable asset, if you're over Medicaid's income limit, if you're under Medicaid's limit, if you're going to need a QIT, and more importantly, I'm going to tell you how I'm going to protect each asset, so for a married couple, I will have a plan of how it's going to be protected, and then I will even do a second tier down that it will protect it if one parent dies, how I'm going to protect it for their children.

If they're not married, obviously, it's just going to be one plan, how to protect it for their kids. I always like to say, Tom, it's a blueprint to follow in case there is a major medical event that happens. They don't have to worry about how are we going to pay for this? They can worry about their loved one, and they know that we have the plan already in place. I always also say it's like an insurance policy for the estate plan that you do for them because whatever plan that I do, I try and replicate their estate plan.

Tom: Robert, one thing I want listeners to know is that-- and that is that the younger the client is, the more money we can save them because some of what you do is based on an actuarial table based on the government's tables about how long somebody can be expected to live depending on what their age is, and the younger they start this Medicaid planning, the more we can protect for them.

Robert: Absolutely. Sometimes when we have a client that is aging with great assets, we can pre-sign or pre-execute a personal services contract. However, we don't actually fund that until someone is getting ready to apply for Medicaid. As long as the contract is signed by both parties and the service giver is actually helping their parent like I'm currently-- I help my mom, then I can protect all the assets ahead of time.

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