What about Medicaid and Medicare? Well, Medicare only covers one hundred days of skilled nursing care. After that, you’re on your own or you have to apply and roll over to Medicaid. In order to do that, you can only have a small, limited number of assets in your possession. How do you avoid having to spend down all your assets?
You plan ahead. I can help if you or a family member gets into a situation where they have to go to Medicaid now and work to save as many assets as possible. However, the only way to keep every asset is to plan ahead by at least five years.
That’s because Medicaid currently has a five year look-back period, as opposed to the three years they practiced in the past. That means they can go back and look at any transfers that have been made in the previous five years and determine if any of those transactions have been made for the purposes of avoiding the Medicaid spend-out or preventing that asset from being countable. At which point, that asset transfer could be voided, you could be denied long-term care, or deemed ineligible for Medicaid entirely.
Give me a call when you’re interested in planning for the future.
