According to the Family Caregiver Alliance, the National Center on Caregiving, some of the financial and legal ramifications the disease will cause someone else to have to handle include: your loved one’s financial affairs during the remainder of their lifetime; management of their personal care such as medical decisions, decisions on where the individual will live and when or if the individual will be placed in a nursing home; arrangement for payment of long-term health care through private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and Supplemental Security Income; preserving the family’s assets; and distribution of assets on his or her death.
These decision require in-depth knowledge of Medicaid laws and regulations, Social Security, Special Needs Trusts, Conservatorships, Durable Power of Attorney for health care and asset management, tax planning and housing and health care contracts so the sooner you can begin the process of finding a lawyer with expertise in all of these fields the more options that lawyer can offer (and the less stress you will have to deal with).
The fact is that not all elder law attorneys can help with all those aspects of elder law. The website, www.caregiver.org even suggests you may need to hire more than one lawyer to handle all those aspects but anyone can see that the more people you have to hire to help with this the more disconnect there will be. That’s just one aspect of traditional planning that makes planning so fragmented. If you want an experience that eliminates the frustration of too many conversations using too many discordant themes you are going to have to hire someone or a team of someones that all communicate from the same playbook and that’s the benefit of a LifePlan because that team already exists.
