To assist caregivers who are making arrangements for long term care a booklet concerning Alabama Medicaid is being made available to provide clarity for some of the issues that may arise and to provide basic information about the application process. The booklet is made available here and will remain available in the Publications section of our website. It can be read online or downloaded and printed.
Category Archives: Special Needs Planning
Save Your Money with a Medicaid Spend Down Special Needs Trust
You don’t really have to spend down all your resources to qualify for nursing home Medicaid. There are multiple ways to preserve funds. One of those ways is through the use of what I call the Medicaid Spend Down Special Needs Trust.
Usually persons who need nursing home care end up needing Medicaid to pay for that care. Why? Because it is so expensive. Nursing home care can cost between $6000 and $8000 depending on the specific market area in Alabama. At $7000 per month, the average nursing home resident will spend $84,000 in a year. Under these circumstances, most persons will exhaust their resources at a rapid rate rendering them unable to pay for the care they need without the assistance of Medicaid.
There are some funds a married couple can preserve for the spouse who remains at home, but there is still an amount that has to be spent down if a couple has countable assets over $25,000. A single person has to spend all of his or her resources down to $2000 before he or she can qualify for Medicaid. Using up the assets a person saved over a lifetime is known as the dreaded Medicaid “spend down.”
But what many people do not know is that there is a way to qualify for Medicaid to pay for nursing home care in Alabama without the resident having to go through a complete “spend down.” That is through the use of a pooled Special Needs Trust.
There are many types of Special Needs Trusts (SNTs), including trusts for disabled younger persons, disabled children whose parents and grandparents want to provide for their future needs, persons on public benefits who recover money from personal injury lawsuits or who inherit money when a relative dies. Each type of SNT has highly specific requirements. But what they all have in common is the goal of protecting funds for a disabled person without those funds resulting in the loss of public benefits.
With the Medicaid Spend Down SNT, instead of spending down the money required to be spent by Medicaid on nursing home care before eligibility can be established, the money is paid into a SNT and can then be used to pay for special needs not otherwise paid for by Medicaid for the disabled person once he or she becomes eligible. Medicaid eligibility can be immediately established while these funds remain available to pay for special needs for the nursing home resident.
The drawback to this type of trust is the requirement that, on the death of the person for whom the trust was established, Medicaid must be reimbursed from funds remaining in the trust up to the amount Medicaid has paid for the nursing home resident’s care. Still, creating a pool of money to meet the special needs of the nursing home resident after being awarded Medicaid is far better than simply spending down those funds before qualifying for Medicaid and leaving the resident with no resources to pay for special needs. Since Medicaid allows a nursing home resident to keep only $30 of his or her income each month to pay for personal needs, you can see how that is not enough to have needs met without families pitching in to help pay for necessary items.
An example of what the SNT funds can pay for is a private room in a nursing home since Medicaid will only cover a semi-private room. Other special needs might be items and services that can improve the quality of life for the nursing home resident such as hair salon charges, manicures, telephone, newspaper subscriptions, audiobooks, movies, recreation, medical and dental expenses not otherwise covered, special equipment like wheelchairs or specially-equipped vans; therapy or rehabilitation services; training and education, travel, electronic equipment including computers and mobile devices.
With a little planning the quality of life for a nursing home resident can be improved, and the burden for a family’s out of pocket expenses decreased.
Do not be confused with an internet search. The rules are different from state to state. Most states allow a person 65 and older to create a pooled SNT but still penalize transfers into that trust. That is not the case in Alabama.
Contact us for more information about establishing a Medicaid Spend Down SNT.
Publication on Planning for Death
No one wants to plan for it, but death is inevitable. To be sure your loved ones are protected and your assets pass as you wish, you need to understand asset titling and the probate process. This publication is Alabama specific and provides an overview of the ways property can be passed at death. This document can be read online or downloaded and printed. It will remain available in the Publications at this web site.
Wills and Beneficiary Designations Work Together to Distribute Your Estate
While a will is an important document to have in any estate plan, the reality is that most property passes to heirs through other, less formal means. Failure to recognize this fact can result in some unintended consequences in estate distributions.
Many bank and investment accounts, as well as real estate, can be titled to joint owners who take ownership automatically at your death. Other banks and investment companies offer “payable on death” accounts that permit owners to name the person or people who will receive the account funds when the owner dies. Life insurance, of course, permits the owner to name beneficiaries. Some real property is titled to joint owners with rights of survivorship so that when one owner dies, the other takes full ownership of the property. A future interest in property can be transferred during a person’s life, subject to a life estate held by the transferor, so that when the life estate holder dies, the property is owned by the person/s to whom the future interest was given. No probate would be necessary.
All of these types of ownership and beneficiary designations permit these accounts and types of property to avoid probate, meaning that they will not be governed by the terms of a will. When taking advantage of these simplified procedures, owners need to be sure that the decisions they make are consistent with their overall estate plan. It is not unusual for a will to direct that an estate be equally divided among the decedent’s children, only to find that because of joint accounts or beneficiary designations, the estate is distributed unequally, or even to non-family members, such as new or old boyfriends and girlfriends.
It is also important to review beneficiary designations every few years to make sure that they still reflect your wishes. An out-of-date designation may leave property to an ex-spouse, to children who disappeared from you life while other children provided care, to ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends, to relatives who are on means tested public benefits who will lose those benefits by inheriting, and to people who died before the owner. All of these failures to make proper designations can thoroughly undermine an estate plan and leave a legacy of resentment that most people would prefer to avoid.
These concerns are heightened when dealing with retirement plans, whether IRAs, SEPs or 401(k) plans, because the choice of beneficiary can have significant tax implications. These types of retirement plans benefit from deferred taxation in that the income deposited into them, as well as the earnings on the investments, are not taxed until the funds are withdrawn. In addition, owners may withdraw funds based more or less on their life expectancy, so the younger the owner, the smaller the annual required distribution. Further, in most cases, withdrawals do not have to begin until after the owner reaches age 70 1/2. However, this is not always the case for inherited IRAs. To further complicate matters, the spouse has a right to funds in a 401(k) that must be disclaimed by waiver after marriage to prevent their having rights to those funds even if you named someone else as your 401(k) beneficiary.
Following are some of the rules and concerns when designating retirement account beneficiaries:
- Name your spouse, usually. Surviving husbands and wives may roll over retirement plans inherited from their spouses into their own plans. This means that they can defer withdrawals until after they reach age 70 1/2 and take minimum distributions based on their age. Non-spouses of retirement plans must begin taking distributions immediately, but they can base them on their own presumably younger ages.
- But not always. There are a few reasons you might not want to name your spouse, including the following:
- He or she is incapacitated and can’t manage the account
- Doing so would add to his or her taxable estate
- You are in a second marriage and want the investments to benefit your first family
- Your children need the money more than your spouse
- Consider a trust. In some circumstances, a trust would be appropriate, providing for management in the case of an incapacitated spouse, permitting assets to benefit a surviving spouse while being preserved for the next generation. Those in first marriages may want to name their spouse as the primary beneficiary and a trust as the secondary, or contingent, beneficiary. Transferring assets to a trust can also be used to plan for long-term care expenses if planning is done early enough (five years before you or your spouse need nursing home care).
- But check the trust. Most trusts are not designed to accept retirement fund assets. If they are missing key provisions, they might not be treated as “designated beneficiaries” for retirement plan purposes. In such cases, rather than being able to stretch out distributions during the beneficiary’s lifetime, the IRA or 401(k) will have to be liquidated within five years of the decedent’s death, resulting in accelerated taxation.
- Be careful with charities. While there are some tax benefits to naming charities as beneficiaries of retirement plans, if a charity is a partial beneficiary of an account or of a trust, the other beneficiaries may not be able to stretch the distributions during their life expectancies and will have to withdraw the funds and pay the taxes within five years of the owner’s death. One solution is to dedicate some retirement plans exclusively to charities and others to family members.
- Consider special needs planning. It can be unfortunate if retirement plans pass to individuals with special needs who cannot manage the accounts or who may lose vital public benefits as a result of receiving the funds. This can be resolved by naming a special needs trust as the beneficiary of the funds, although this gets a bit more complicated than most trusts designed to receive retirement funds. Another alternative is not to name the individual with special needs or his trust as beneficiary, but to make up the difference with other assets of the estate or through life insurance.
- If probate will be necessary, leave an account jointly titled with your personal representative to provide expenses during probate. If your home needs to be sold, funds will need to be available to pay property tax, insurance, utilities, etc.
- Keep copies of your beneficiary designation forms. Don’t count on your retirement plan administrator to maintain records of your beneficiary designations, especially if the plan is connected with a company you worked for in the past, which may or may not still exist upon your death. Keep copies of all of your forms and provide your estate planning attorney with a copy to keep with your estate plan.
- But do name beneficiaries! The biggest mistake many people make is not to name beneficiaries at all, or they end up in this position by not updating their plan after the originally-named beneficiary passes away. This means that the plan will have to go through probate at some expense and delay and that the funds will have to be withdrawn and taxes paid within five years of the owner’s death.
In short, while wills are important, in large part because they name a personal representative to take charge of your estate and they name guardians for minor children and disabled spouses, they are only a small part of the picture. A comprehensive plan needs to include consideration of beneficiary designations, especially those for retirement plans.
Quarterly Newsletter Available
Our quarterly newsletter, Elder Law Bookmarks, was sent today. Articles included in the newsletter are:
- People with Disabilities Can Now Create Their Own Special Needs Trusts
- Is it Better to Remarry or Just Live Together?
- Repealing Obamacare Will Have Consequences for Medicare
- For Better or Worse, States Are Turning to Managed Care for Medicaid Long-Term-Care
- Make Reviewing Your Estate Plan One of Your New Year’s Resolutions
If you want to be added to the mail list, send an email to neal@janneallaw.com.
Elder Law Training at OLLI
On October 10, 2016, Jan taught the first of a two part presentation on Elder Law at Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Auburn University entitled Elder Law: Enhancing the Lives of Seniors Through Education, Planning For What Comes Next. The second session will be taught on Monday, October 17, 2016, at 2:30 p.m. at The Clarion in Auburn, Alabama.
Topics covered in this training include: Older Americans Act Legal Assistance; Important Documents Needed for Proper Planning; Authority Issues; Long-term Care Levels of Care and Payment Options; Medicaid for Long-term Care; Special Needs Planning; Probate; Administration of Estates; Planning for Last Remains and Funerals.
A 39 page Keynote presentation covering these topics is provided to course participants.
Anyone interested in this and the many other learning opportunities available through OLLI can learn more by visiting the OLLI website.
Alabama ABLE Act to Provide Planning Opportunity for Disabled Persons
On June 9, 2015, Governor Bentley signed ABLE Act legislation into law in Alabama permitting the state to implement a program to permit developmentally disabled persons to have limited tax free savings without losing public benefits. ABLE stands for Achieving a Better Life Experience, and the act was passed on the federal level in December 2014 permitting each state to set up its own program. Though the program in Alabama has not yet become operable, it will be getting underway in the coming months.
The ABLE Act will permit up to $14,000 per year to be placed in one approved bank account set up for a developmentally disabled person living in Alabama (one who became disabled prior to age 26) with those funds exempt from counting as resources for public benefit purposes. This means that the disabled person can have these funds to use for disability-related expenses without losing his or her public benefits such as SSI or Medicaid. Up to $100,000 can be accumulated in an ABLE account without loss of SSI, and $350,000 can be accumulated in such an account in Alabama without loss of Medicaid (note that this is state specific, and some states may permit an accumulation as high as $425,210 or as low as $235,000 before loss of Medicaid). At the death of the disabled person any funds left in the ABLE account will be payable to Medicaid to repay that agency in amounts up to what the agency paid for the disabled person’s health care costs.
Contributions to an ABLE account are not tax deductible, and income earned by an ABLE account is not taxable.
Stay tuned for more information about these accounts in the coming months or go to the Alabama State Treasury’s ABLE website and sign up for an update notification when accounts are available.
Jan Neal Law Firm, LLC 