Which direction should you go for your loved ones?

Attorney and Financial Advisor Chris Berry discuss the Elder Care Journey or the Elder Care Continuum and the Difference between Home Care Assisted Living and Nursing Home Care in this episode of Daily Wisdom.

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.

For more info visit:
https://castlewealthlegal.com/home
https://michiganestateplanning.com/

Episode Transcript

Elder Care Journey

Hey, in today’s Daily Wisdom, this is Chris Berry, and we’re going to talk about the difference between home care assisted living and nursing home care. We call this the elder care journey. If you like this information, please make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Christopher Berry is a leading estate attorney and advisor in the area of retirement and legacy planning. He’s been featured in publications such as Forbes, Kiplinger’s, Crain’s Detroit and more. He’s the host of the weekly radio show and podcast, The Chris Berry Show. He’s a national thought leader as it relates to retirement and legacy planning and has authored the Amazon best selling book, The Caregiver’s Legal Guide.

So there’s a lot of confusion around the differences in terms of care between independent living and home care and assisted living and nursing home care. And really, I created this video in answer to a question that was submitted on a neighborhood page where someone was looking for some help for their father. They needed independent living and people started throwing out all these different recommendations. A majority of them were not independent living. A majority of them were either assisted living or rehab or nursing home care. So it can be confusing for families to figure out, “Which direction should we go for our loved one?” And that’s why as a certified elder law attorney, we have what we call the elder care journey or the continuum of care where what we find is first, we need to figure out where someone is at in terms of their health. What activities of daily living can they do?

Can they walk around? Do they need a walker? Are they bedridden? Can they prepare meals? Are they a wandering threat? And then once we figure out where they’re at, then the next step is to figure out, what level of care do they need. And most people start off living at home independently until we get to the point where we can’t live at home independently anymore. Even if we bring in caregivers, maybe that caregiver is a spouse, to start off with, or maybe a commercial home care company. There’s a lot of different commercial home care companies out there. But we might get to a point where just with the amount of care we need, living at home, even with care, is not feasible anymore. Then we might transition to independent living. Independent living is like a hotel or apartment type environments, senior living. And there might be some assisted living aspects added onto it, because what happened was a lot of these independent living communities, what happened is a lot of them were starting to lose population, lose clients because they’d have to transition from independent living to assisted living.

Assisted Living

And so what a lot of these independent living communities did is they brought in almost like their own home care. So almost mirror assisted living. So the lines between independent living and assisted living are starting to merge or gray or get a little bit fuzzy. But typically, when you’re looking at independent living, that’s going to run anywhere from maybe 1,500 to $3,000 a month. Then when you get into assisted living, which is, again, that hotel or apartment type environment with maybe additional services, that might be running anywhere from two to five, six, $7,000 per month. And then we transition or move into assisted living with memory care. This is that same hotel or apartment type environment but more of a lockdown situation. Here we’re going to see costs ranging anywhere from five to eight or $9,000 per month. There’s going to be more memory care services available. It’s more of going to be a protective environment.

And then the next step is nursing home level care. This is more of a hospital type environment or a rehab. And that’s where we see two different types of nursing home. One is what we call rehabilitation or rehab. Typically, this is going to be covered by Medicare up to a hundred days, and then the person’s going to have to transition somewhere else. The other type of nursing home care is more of long-term care where someone might be there for a number of years. On average, the average stay in a nursing home according to current statistics is about two and a half years. And one and two individuals will need nursing home care. And nursing home care is going to run you eight to 12, 13, $14,000 a month, but this is where Medicaid can help pay for that cost of care.

Elder Care Continuum

So it’s important to understand that this elder care continuum of living at home and then bringing in home care and then independent living and then assisted living and then assisted living with memory care and then nursing home care. So if you do have a loved one that needs care, first we need to identify, what level of care do they need? And maybe we send out a social worker to be able to do that. And then second, we find the appropriate type of care where they’re going to receive that care, whether it’s at home or whether it’s one of these communities.

And then the third step, and this is where really we get involved, is how are we going to go about either planning for that care, planning to pay for that care, or if we’re in a crisis mode and someone’s already needing this level of care, how do we pay for it? Are there any governmental benefits that we can bring in, like the veterans benefit? Can we utilize long-term care insurance if it’s available? Can we leverage the assets for long-term care? Can we utilize Medicaid? Are there things to do to protect those assets so that we’re not losing all that money to the devastating cost of longterm care? So hopefully you found this helpful. This has been Chris Berry with Castle Wealth Group talking about the elder care continuum.

Castle Wealth Group has clients across the nation and helps families plan, protect, and preserve what is important by creating a retirement and legacy blueprint.