How do you protect your life savings from the cost of a nursing home?

Attorney Tom Olsen: For listeners out there, when you're out there in the community talking to your friends and family and co-workers and neighbors and you hear these words, "Well, my mom's going into a nursing home, $10,000 to $12,000 a month. Everything she's ever worked for all her life up in smoke. It's all going to be gone. Nothing we can do." That, in fact, is not correct. At the Olsen Law Group, we have all the medically compliant tools we need to protect your wealth from the cost of a nursing home.

We can assist you wherever you live in the state of Florida. We can help you with that process. That's exactly what Robert does. Robert, whether it's a home or a vacation home, IRS, money in the bank, all of it, we can protect it.

Attorney Robert Hidock: Absolutely. People often think, "Oh, we have a second home," that's not their primary home. Of course, that's a countable asset but you know what, there are different tools that we can do to protect that asset. They can put it up for rent, they can sell it. At times, let's say it's a family home like on a lake house, we can literally put that home in a personal services contract. We just do a deed in lieu of cash.

Tom Olsen: Robert, we can do planning for people either way. One way is that they call us and say, "Tom, my mom's going into a nursing home next week. We need to get it done right away." The other way is we do some pre-planning. Tell people how we might do pre-planning.

Robert Hidock: Pre-planning always starts with education, so I encourage people to attend one of our workshops. Then for pre-planning, we go through several stages. Some of it is done in the estate planning way. We'll go through having a lady bird deed on the house to protect any recovery from Medicaid, of course, an incredible power of attorney. Then one of our last steps is a Medicaid assessment or they'll meet with me personally. I will go over their income, their assets. I'm going to tell them if they're going to need a QIT, if they're going to be over income.

I'm going to tell them what assets are not countable, what are exposed and countable, and how I'm going to protect them. It will be a very detailed plan for them, a blueprint to follow if something should happen, to give them security. Then finally, if I'm meeting with them and I'm talking to them and they're saying, "My mom's having a hard time moving," or "We've already brought in a couple people to take care of her," then Tom, I'm going to move right into the last stage of it is getting them a Medicaid long-term care waiver waitlist to get them in the queue so they can start getting some home health care.

Tom Olsen: [unintelligible 00:02:30] some more detail but one thing it makes me think about is that when you're doing this Medicaid planning for people to protect their wealth from the cost of a nursing home, you are using an IRS actuarial table. You're calculating according to the IRS table how many years that person would be expected to live.

Robert Hidock: Correct.

Tom Olsen: If they're expected to live for 20 more years, you can actually protect more than if they're only expected to live, I don't know, five more years.

Robert Hidock: Yes, absolutely. A lot of times when a client is aging, let's say they're in their mid to late 80s or even 90s, life expectancy isn't that great. If they have a lot of money, sometimes as part of pre-planning, we will actually execute personal services contracts. We lock in life expectancy, however, no money has to be transferred at that time. It would be transferred at the time of a Medicaid application. The only caveat is that their kids have to be taking care of them now or helping them.

Tom Olsen: That's the advantage of doing pre-planning. If you were 70 years old and said, "Tom, I want to make sure that I protect my wealth from the cost of a nursing home," there is an advantage to doing that planning now when you're 70 versus when you're 85.

Robert Hidock: Certainly, we can protect a lot more assets.

Tom Olsen: Robert, tell the listeners how they can reach you.

Robert Hidock: They can either go to our website, click on me, and our website olsenlawgroup.com. They can email me at rhidock@olsenlawgroup.com or they can text me at 321-207-8493 which is also my direct line. They can call me and if I'm not at my desk, it will then ring to my cell phone. Of course, if you can't-- you can leave me a message and I'll call you right back.

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