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Protect Your Bonita Springs Estate and Pay for Your Long Term Health Care

Long-Term Care

When you are looking for ways to protect your Bonita Springs estate while paying for long-term health care, you are usually looking for ways to protect or utilize assets that would normally be taken by Medicaid when your spouse goes into assisted living. The best way to protect your estate is to understand the Medicaid application rules and be familiar with the term community spouse.

The Community Spouse

In Medicaid terminology, the community spouse is the spouse that is not going to be utilizing assisted living. Medicaid rules make provisions for the community spouse, and those provisions can be used to help protect your assets. If you do not have long-term health insurance, then you will need to find ways to protect your family assets and prevent them from being taken by Medicaid to pay for long-term care. In this instance, the community spouse has a great deal of power that can be put to good use.

Spousal Impoverishment Rules

Medicaid has a set of rules called spousal impoverishment rules that allow the community spouse to keep a certain portion of the couple’s assets to be able to pay the household bills while their spouse is in assisted living.

One of the ways to protect your estate and qualify for Medicaid is to use the spousal impoverishment rules to your advantage. For example, if a couple has $20,000 in savings and are preparing to apply to Medicaid to help the husband, the wife can expect to keep $10,000 without affecting the husband’s eligibility and the husband can retain $1,000. The excess $9,000 could cause the husband to have to wait for Medicaid eligibility. But if the wife uses that excess $9,000 to pay down the mortgage on the home, then all that would be left is the husband’s $1,000. Since there is no longer any excess, the husband would qualify for Medicaid.

Non-Countable Assets

Certain assets such as a house or car do not affect Medicaid eligibility when there is a community spouse involved. Medicaid allows the community spouse to spend countable assets (cash) on non-countable assets to improve their spouse’s chance of Medicaid eligibility and to make sure that those assets are not taken by Medicaid.

Prior to applying for Medicaid, the community spouse could invest a large portion of the couple’s savings into their home. This would lower their countable assets and improve the spouse’s chance of getting approved for Medicaid. It would also enhance the value of their home without incurring any Medicaid penalty.

The Mattar Firm can help you to protect your Bonita Springs estate as you and your spouse start to consider the costs of long-term care. Instead of putting your assets at risk, come talk to The Mattar Firm’s asset protection lawyers about ways to protect your assets and make sure Medicaid does not hand you a financial crisis.

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