Medicaid Spend Downs
One of the most crippling situations for families is when a loved one needs long-term care, they start to look at prices for nursing homes and realize that it is just not possible to keep paying over the long haul without losing everything. Medicaid becomes a path to take to finance your loved one’s care, but you have to do a “spend down” in order to reach the asset levels that Medicaid insists on before you qualify.
And then the family makes the worst decision possible… they go to the government Medicaid Office for help.
I have made multiple videos, webinars, and even a course that mentions the worst thing to do when trying to qualify for Medicaid is to go to the Medicaid Office for help since their job is not to help you keep as much as possible but instead to make the family pay everything possible until flat broke. In one case, a husband and son went into debt rather than spend down mom’s money in order to qualify because that’s what the Medicaid caseworker told them to do. Here are three big Don’ts of Medicaid Planning: https://youtu.be/85rx2e7xidU
The best thing to do early in the process is to find an attorney who focuses on Medicaid Planning or even a Certified Medicaid Planner to put together an actual plan that can help save the family as much as possible. In the meantime, my office has put together a Medicaid Spend Down Priorities Cheat Sheet to help you realize that there are better options than going to the government to help keep your own hard-earned money.
But here are the big things to keep in mind:
- You don’t need to be frugal in spending only on care for your loved one. Medicaid doesn’t give extra points for your loved one going without things they want or need, and seeing that you are only spending their money on their care doesn’t matter to them.
- Medicaid doesn’t care about someone who is applying for Medicaid spending their money on themselves. They only care about gifts or spending money on other people.
- Spending money on a professional to help preserve as much as possible for the family is a legitimate expense, and paying them a few months of what you would otherwise spend on care is usually far more productive than keeping your fingers crossed that a solution will magically appear before the money runs out.
Get the FREE Medicaid Spend Down Priorities Cheat Sheet by clicking here, and if you want to take the time, check out the free webinar on how to pay for long-term care at http://www.payforlongtermcare.com