My Plan to Protect $85,000 For a Married Couple & Get Them Medicaid
Would you be interested in protecting $85,000 (or more) from nursing home bills? If your answer is “yes”, then this post is for you. Welcome to the latest installment in my series of real life asset protection.
In this case I showed a family how to protect $85,000 in assets for their mother whose husband was in a nursing home and become Medicaid eligible in one month.
The Assets Involved
Our story begins with a husband wife. They had total assets worth around $88,000 made up of bank accounts, CDs, cash value life insurance and IRAs. They also had a home and a car.
Unfortunately the husband needed nursing home care. The wife in this case was looking at a nursing home bill of over $4,800 a month. This was on top of other medical costs plus the room rate of $160 per day. As you can imagine, everyone was quite alarmed and anxious to qualify for nursing home Medicaid before the financial devastation began.
What Was At Risk
This couple’s at risk assets were $42,000! You calculate that by taking their $88,000 and then subtracting the $2,000 the husband can keep as well as the $44,000 the wife can keep. That’s a lot of money they could lose!
With her husband already in a nursing home that means anything we did was going to be within the lookback period. That means it is impossible to protect anything, right?
Wrong, take a look at my previous discussion on why the lookback period does not prevent asset protection when you know what you are doing.
The Solution
When they came to me the husband and wife were approximately $45,000 over the nursing home Medicaid asset limit. They had to do something with that money before they could qualify for Medicaid. They also had to be careful not to create a Medicaid penalty.
So how did I create nursing home Medicaid eligibility in one month for a couple $45,000 over the asset limit while still preserving financial security for the wife?
I restructured the majority of the $45,000 into a new form. This step allowed her husband to qualify for Medicaid and still provided financial security for her.
The rest of the funds (a few thousand dollars) I set aside for her great-grandchildren at her request.
Nursing Home Bill = $0
And last but not least, her husband’s nursing home bill went down from over $4,800 to $0. I designed this plan to create Medicaid eligibility in one month and we were successful.
Her husband was also over the Medicaid income limit of $2,199. To fix that, I put a Miller Trust in place. However, the Miller Trust distributed all of the income to the wife every month. This was because their total income was below $2,980.50.
Asset Protection & Eligibility In 1 Month
So there you have it. Another Medicaid plan that provided eligibility in one month and $85,000 in assets shielded from nursing home costs. Keep this example in mind the next time somebody tells you that you cannot protect assets or when you are writing out the check for that next nursing home bill. If your goal is something similar to what I just accomplished for this family then contact me and let’s see what I can do for you.
If They Didn’t Hire a Medicaid Lawyer
This family would have seen a much different result if they didn’t hire a nursing home Medicaid attorney. Remember how the total assets in this case were $88,000? The HHSC would have left the wife with $44,000 if they did nothing or went the spend down route.
Fortunately that didn’t happen. They contacted me and were able to keep the entire $88,000 as well as cut the nursing home bill to $0.
This post is about a married couple. Here is how I protected $99,000 for a client who was not married.