You can protect your assets from the cost of a nursing home or skilled nursing facility.

Attorney Tom Olsen: I'm joined in the studio now by Attorney Robert Hidock.

Robert, welcome to the show.

Attorney Robert Hidock: Thanks for having me today on this beautiful Saturday, Tom.

Tom: Robert, tell us this is what they might call you about today.

Robert: People would be calling me about having to protect their assets from someone going into a nursing home. One of the top specialty or my specialty is asset protection. If one of their loved ones was getting ready to go to a nursing home and they were in fear that they would have to spend all of their money to pay for their nursing home, they would call me and I would be able to help them.

Tom: Robert, we know that there is so much misinformation out there about nursing homes, but we know that there are a few things that we know that people know and think they know out there about nursing homes. One is, is that a nursing home has a five-year look-back period, or Medicaid does, and that's true.

Robert: Absolutely true.

Tom: Most people think, "Hey, five-year look-back period, not a thing we can do," but the fact of the matter is, is that if somebody is going into a nursing home or even if they're already there, we do have Medicaid-compliant tools to protect their wealth from nursing homes.

Robert: That we do, and they bypass Medicaid's five-year look-back period. They are actually expected from Medicaid that we would use them or a client would use them to protect their money. One such one is a personal services contract.

Tom: If somebody said, "Robert, my mom's going into a nursing home next week," hey, we can take care of them. If somebody came to you and said, "Hey, Robert, now we know mom's going into a nursing home for a year, now we know that we can protect her wealth from nursing homes," we could still do it for them.

Robert: Absolutely.

Tom: Folks, we're talking about the home that they live in, their cash accounts or retirement accounts, their rental properties, all of it. We have the tools that we can protect them from the cost of a nursing home.

Robert: Exactly. I spoke to one of our clients earlier in the week. His mom is already on Medicaid, which we helped her get on, and he called up in a panic because his brother, unfortunately, passed away and he left his mom as the beneficiary. Now, mom was going to have $50,000 of new assets that were going to kick her off Medicaid. What we're doing for him is we're doing a personal services contract from mom, paying the remaining son to be her caregiver via the personal service contract, and we are allowing her to keep her eligibility, and her son will now then have the money.

Tom: That's great news to hear that, Robert. Really, the word we're trying to get out there to people is that if you, if your parents or a neighbor or a friend or a coworker, when you hear these words, "Somebody's going into a nursing home," and they throw up their hands and say, "Boy, everything they've ever worked for are all going down a drain, $10,000, $12,000 a month, nothing we can do," please let them know that there is something we can do here at the Olsen Law Group. We have the tools to protect all of that wealth that they have accumulated during their lifetime. Why do we want to do that? Well, we know from experience, we do estate planning too, is that when people pass away, they want to pass on as much of their wealth as they can to their children without it being eaten up within a nursing home.

Robert: That's one of our goals here when we do Medicaid planning, is to make a blueprint of your estate plan and try and follow it exactly. Maybe they're not getting their inheritance, they're getting it in advance, but it is still their plan that they set up with you.

Tom: Yes, we do estate planning too, wills and trust, so if parents come to us and say, "Tom, we own a home, we own a condo at the beach, we've got several hundred thousand dollars in cash, we've got IRAs, we've got a vacation home in North Carolina, we've got a pension, Social Security, we want to leave this equally to our three kids," that's the first thing we do, but the next thing we need to do is make sure that those assets are still there when mom and dad pass away, and they haven't all been used up in a nursing home.

Robert: Exactly, and we are very capable of doing that.

[00:03:56] [END OF AUDIO]