Lady Bird Deed Map!!! Here is the In Depth After Party where Greg explains a Lady Bird Deed and how it can protect your house. Get the LBD Map here: mcelderlaw.com/lbd or call: 704-749-9244 to learn more.
Greg McIntyre: Hi, this is Greg McIntyre with McIntyre Elder Law, helping seniors protect their assets and legacies, and we just finished up the Charlotte Today Show talking about Lady Bird deeds and the Lady Bird deed map. And I wanted to use this, this is the after show kind of explanation where we get a little more in depth and dig a little deeper into whatever subject matter.
And today we’re talking about Lady Bird deeds, a little known deed that packs a big impact. It could impact you and your family, let me tell you how. 70% of seniors over the age of 65, according to a 2005 US Department of Health and Human Services report, are going to need some type of longterm care during their lives, either in home, assisted living or nursing home care. Those are huge odds, those are absolutely worse than Vegas odds and Vegas is a big place, it wasn’t built on winners.
So, I don’t want you or your family to lose. So I want to give you this information that you may not hear everywhere. I’m an elder law attorney, that’s all we practice at our firm, McIntyre Elder Law, is estate planning and elder law. We are so serious about it, we named our firm McIntyre Elder Law some time ago, and I still have people come in and ask me who my partner is, Mr. Elder. There is not a Mr. Elder partner, that is the type of law we practice. So I’m going to tell you in elder law how we use Lady Bird deeds, they’re also called enhanced life estate deeds, which means that it’s built off the framework of a traditional life estate deed, but works a little differently.
If you are one of the 70% of seniors over 65 and you need some type of longterm care, do you have the means, do you have the money to pay for that care? Because he can be very expensive when you look at average cost of nursing home or assisted living care annually, and it can take sometimes everything someone worked for their entire lives and spin that down in the last few years of their lives for care. If that happened or if you find yourself in that situation and you don’t have longterm care insurance to pay, then you may roll to Medicaid to pay for that longterm care. If you roll to Medicaid to pay for assisted living or nursing home Medicaid, which is called special assistance Medicaid, that’s the program in North Carolina that pays for assisted living.
Longterm care Medicaid pays for nursing home care, special assistance Medicaid has a three year look back period. Longterm care Medicaid has a five year look back period and they’re going to look at all deed transfers you’ve made, all bank transfers, any asset transfers within that lookback period, and they’re going to make sure that those transfers fit the Medicaid spin down rules, it’s what you’ll see. And you can Google those rules and those are pretty straightforward, but one of the little known policies of North Carolina Medicaid is that they allow a Lady Bird deed to be placed on a home to protect your home, even if you’re within that lookback period. Otherwise, if we gifted the home or if we placed a traditional life estate deed on the home, it wouldn’t be allowable under those Medicaid rules, under that look back period. So you would have to transfer it back or the kids would have to transfer their interest back before Medicaid would pay for longterm care.
A Lady Bird deed allows you to protect your home and any surrounding property, any surrounding parcels and connecting adjacent parcels up to a property value this year of $572,000. So if it’s that or below, then you could put a Lady Bird deed on your home and still access that benefit and it would be fined under the Medicaid rules in North Carolina, even if it was within the lookback period when you placed that on the property. I would argue that even if you already own Medicaid and in endanger of losing your house, then you could put one on then. Timing is not important there, because Medicaid allows that by policy.
Now, the reason Medicaid can take the home is when the home passes title, it has to pass title somehow. Well, that’s through the probate or estate administration, with or without a will, that process at the courthouse. A Medicaid lien can attach to the house if there’s one out there or any other lien, and then it forces the sale or auction of that house and the family loses the house. That is an unfortunate situation. So to combat that, a Lady Bird deed passes the property outside of the probate estate directly to the heirs, that’s how deed planning works, that’s how deed plannings work for a long time, even with traditional life estate deeds. So, a Lady Bird deed is a unique deed that our firm has used for years to help families, specifically with a longterm care issue or are in danger of losing their homes due to longterm care costs.
That’s my cue to start wrapping it up. So, we’ve used that to help them protect their homes and keep farms, land, homes in the family for the next generation. So I would rather, I know, I have six children. My wife and I would rather pass our hard earned money and property to our children, rather than simply losing it or giving it up to the state. I play plenty in taxes, I promise you. So what we’ve done is we’ve created a Lady Bird deed map. I am a visual thinker, I have mapped this out for you. What this is, is this shows that if you’re part of that 70% that needs longterm care, if there is a Medicaid lien that pays for care, how it attaches when it passes through the will and probate process and does not get to the kid because it’s sold to satisfy that lien. But a Lady Bird deed, and we’ve listed the attributes here, passes it directly to the loved ones.
You can get this free Lady Bird deed map by going to mcelderlaw.com, that’s M-C-E-L-D-E-R.com/lbd. You can go to Mcelderlaw.com/lbd and get that free Lady Bird deed map that I’ve created for you today. In addition, if you go to mcelderlaw.com/lbd, we’re also going to give you a free ebook and audio book version of Saving the Farm, A Guide to the Legal Maze of Aging in America. I wrote that look because I didn’t see a lot of books out there like it, that spoke directly to the client and the senior and their families and told them how to navigate that. And it gives you a lot of information, we interviewed experts in their field in different areas of senior care, paying for long term care, benefits, all packed in the Saving the Farm. Very proud of that book. I’m probably more proud of that than most of the things I’ve done in my life besides marrying my wife and have six children.
So, check out that. I’m giving a free copy of that away on the mcelderlaw.com/lbd link, and you’ll get the brief estate planning map. Thank you so much for watching today. I hope you and your family have a good holiday season and I hope you save your farm, your house. Saving the farm is a metaphor, obviously, but everybody really has that legacy they worked to build for themselves and hopefully that can benefit your family. Have a great day. See you soon.
