December 31, 2021
Elder Care Journey | 6 Ways to Pay Long-Term Care
Elder Care Journey | 6 Ways to Pay Long-term Care.
In this episode, Chris Berry answers: Mom fell and is in rehab, we are not sure if she will be able to return home, what are our options?
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Episode Transcript
Mom fell and is in rehab we’re not sure if she’s able to return home what are our options? Welcome to Berry’s Bites! Please join our host attorney and financial advisor Chris Berry.
This is what we call elder care journey and so what happens is we start off living at home independently until we can’t live at home anymore then we might move into either independence slash assisted living and the lines between these are starting to gray then a lot of times we go into a nursing home this is just the common progression and kind of depending on situations. Sometimes you might have a slip and fall at home or some type of event to get you the nursing home sooner but a lot of times we don’t see people going the other way unless it’s short-term rehab so it sounds like in this situation they went into rehab, they’re not returning home or assisted living so now they’re going to need nursing home care.
This is where we need to understand that there are six ways to pay for long-term care so first you can private pay so just pay out of your own funds. Second we can have the kids pay a lot of times they don’t pay financially but they pay in terms of their time whether they’re taking time out of their day to visit with me or putting their life on hold to become a full-time caregiver. Third we have long-term care insurance and there’s different types of this I’m not a fan of traditional long-term care insurance instead we look to a lot of times asset-based long-term care insurance or some hybrid plans for medicare. But medicare really only pays for rehab so when you see medicare think rehab and at most you’re going to have a hundred days fifth we have the VA benefit and the VA benefit is a great way to pay for home care and assisted living but it’s gonna max out at about two thousand dollars per month just over that.
So when you talk about nursing home care which is going to run eight to twelve thousand dollars per month that’s just a drop in the bucket and six we look to Medicaid. Now Medicaid is a governmental program that’s only going to pay for nursing home care it’s not going to pay for assisted living or independent living or home care so in this situation what we would do is okay if mom’s going to remain in nursing home care then we need to do Medicaid planning because a single individual can only have two thousand dollars worth of accountable assets.
Accountable assets are everything other than home small cash value of life insurance personal belongings prepaid funeral and automobile everything else is accountable asset and then medicaid looks back five years to see if you’ve moved any money around and if you have they can penalize you so in this situation we would do what we call medicaid crisis planning where we figure out okay what assets do mom have or if mom’s married mom and dad have and then there’s things we can do at the last minute to protect at least half of the assets using what’s called a half-loaf plan. Kind of complicated but think of it like a loaf of bread half the money might have to go to the nursing home the other half we’d be able to protect what are our options i would say give us a call and work with us to figure out how we can protect as much money as possible to make sure mom has the best quality of life possible. Thank you.