Protect your life savings from nursing homes

There are tools available to protect your life savings from nursing homes and to help you qualify for Medicaid.

Attorney Tom Olsen: How to protect your life savings from nursing homes and Medicaid? This is a big concern for people. We've known it over the years, people ask us about it, and our office is now focusing on helping people to do that. If you're out there and you're in the community and you know that somebody's going to go into a nursing home or your spouse is or you know your parents might be, and you're concerned about this $8,000 to $10,000 a month that cost to keep somebody in a nursing home, man, there are tools that can protect your life savings from nursing homes and have you qualify for Medicaid where the government pays for your nursing home. That's what we are helping people to do, and we're doing a workshop on it again in January 23rd of 2020.

Attorney Chris Merrill: Yes. If you would like to attend, you can text or call me your name and information, and that would be to 407-808-8398, and I will text you back the details of the workshop and reserve a seat for you.

Attorney Tom Olsen: One thing we learned for sure about nursing homes and qualifying for Medicaid is that there's a lot of fiction out there. A lot of people come to us and say, "Well, my neighbor told me this." We're here to help you separate fact from fiction and help you get this done because it's so important. We've done estate planning for all these years and we know that mom and dad, man, they're concerned. Whatever's left over, when they pass away, they want it to go to their kids, they don't want it all eaten up by nursing homes.

Attorney Chris Merrill: Exactly, and, Tom, the process of going through it and qualifying and making it all happen, it's complicated.

Attorney Tom Olsen: It is. That's why we've got a very great team of people to help us get that done for our clients. When it comes down to planning for nursing homes and Medicaid, there's two types of planning: there's crisis planning and there's pre-planning. Most people are doing crisis planning, folks, and the good news is you can still do Medicaid, qualify for Medicaid and protect your savings with crisis planning. It's just a little bit harder on everybody because a lot of people got other things on their mind about how to get the best care for mom and dad. What we're also offering is pre-planning so you can come now even if you don't think- you're not saying, "I'm not going to go in a nursing home next week or next year," but you can get a general idea of what it is that you can do and you can start taking steps to get ready. One of those is simply gathering information like your social security card, your Medicare card, your Part B Medicare card and all your sources of income so that we gather a notebook for you so this notebook is sitting there ready to go if and when the time comes we need to help you to protect your life savings from nursing homes.