As Florida’s population ages, effective long-term care planning has never been more important. The average annual cost for a private nursing home room now exceeds $108,000, and even assisted living hovers at around $54,000. Those prices are only going to go up, and they can quickly deplete a whole life’s savings unless you’re properly prepared. An elder law attorney in Tampa, FL can help you make sure you are.
How Can a Tampa, FL Elder Law Attorney Help With Long-Term Care Planning?
Assessing Your Individual Circumstances
It all begins with assessing your individual circumstances from a place of knowledge and experience. Some of the important things to consider include your health status, financial resources, and family support. With a thorough evaluation, we can forecast your potential care requirements, guide you through housing options, help you look at all the alternatives, like long-term care insurance, and more.
Your Medicaid Advocate
Medicaid is often the primary payer for long-term care, but it comes with strict eligibility criteria. To qualify, you must have very little in countable assets and income, and it’s easy to get in a situation where all your assets and income are simply eaten away.
Elder law attorneys can help you with preemptive planning that allows you to achieve eligibility without having to “spend down” all your assets unnecessarily. They can help you get past the five-year look-back period, where improper asset transfers (like gifting money to your family) could trigger penalties that delay or deny your benefits. Your lawyer will also handle all your applications, any appeals that are necessary, and make sure everything is done in compliance with Florida’s rules.
Asset Protection
Without planning, your long-term care costs could completely erode your estate and leave nothing for your loved ones. An attorney knows all the right legal tools to safeguard your wealth for your heirs while allowing you to still qualify for benefits. These might include establishing irrevocable trusts, revocable living trusts, engaging in the right gifting strategies, or even creating first-party, third-party, or pooled special needs trusts to preserve your eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Medicaid.
Drafting All Documents
There’s a lot of paperwork that goes into properly setting up your long-term care plan, and your attorney will make sure nothing is missed and that everything is created and filed properly. You might need everything from a Durable Power of Attorney to various advanced directives for end-of-life preferences, DNR orders, or Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). Your will and any trusts also need to stay updated regularly so they continue to reflect your wishes, and then they may need to be changed if there are any big changes to your circumstances.
There’s a lot more that a lawyer can do to help, so contact the Law Office of Elizabeth Devolder in Tampa, FL today to talk with an experienced attorney. Whether you need to do estate planning, trust administration, guardianship, litigation, or more, we have the experience you need in Tampa and Sarasota.
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