October 14, 2022
Is a Castle Trust same as Medicaid Irrevocable Trust?
Is a Castle Trust same as Medicaid Irrevocable Trust? In this episode of Berry’s Bites, Chris Berry answers the question: Is a Castle Trust the same as a Medicaid Irrevocable Trust?
Estate Attorney and Advisor Chris Berry of Castle Wealth Group answers questions on retirement and estate planning every Wednesday at 1pm. Register via this link or give our office a call at 844-885-4200.
Castle Wealth Group and Christopher Berry help families with estate planning, elder law, retirement planning, and tax planning from their offices in Brighton, Ann Arbor, Livonia, Bloomfield Hills, and Novi.
Castle Wealth Group helps families with their legal, financial, and tax planning for their retirement and legacy.
With the use of legal structures like revocable living trusts, Castle Trusts (asset protection trusts), Chris Berry and Castle Wealth Group can help your family plan, protect, and preserve what is important through their Retirement and Legacy Blueprint Process.
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Episode Transcript:
Is a Castle Trust the same as a Medicaid irrevocable trust?
The answer is maybe so we call it a castle trust what it is is an asset protection trust and there are different ways that you can set this up but the idea is what this accomplishes is three things. So first of all this avoids probate which most people want to do because it’s a court process time consuming costly second we can protect our kids or protect the beneficiaries and decide where the assets go so we can protect our kids from divorces creditors bankruptcies whatever life may throw at them and third most important it can build asset protection and there are two forms of asset protection that our Castle Trust can help protect against one would be like lawsuits and creditors.
Like if you were to get a car accident ensued and then the other one is that nursing home or medicaid spend down so what the castle trust does is avoids probate protects beneficiaries and then also builds in this asset protection so I would say yes, this is a form of Medicaid irrevocable trust I just don’t like using this word because people have different connotations and there are lots of different types of irrevocable trusts.
Like with this trust you can still change beneficiaries you can still serve as a trustee you could sell your house and downsize and move into a condo if you want to you can go from google stock to Apple stock so you’re in control you pay income tax the way you normally do so it’s to use a technical term it’s a grantor trust so basically in almost every respect it’s like a revocable trust but it just builds in the asset protection so yeah I guess you could term the castle trust as a form of Medicaid irrevocable trust because it protects against Medicaid nursing home spend down but you can make changes to it so I don’t like the term irrevocable because you can still make changes to it you’re still the trustee you’re still in charge you can take assets out of the trust if you wanted to so yeah that’s why we call it a Castle Trust.