Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: A lot of people will apply for Medicaid before they have spent down or before their assets are in range and they will always be denied. You have to be within these limits before you apply. I encourage you to always use an expert when applying for these programs. I had someone last week.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: All right. Welcome to Lancapedia episode six. I'm Garrett Lel of the Wealth Partners YouTube channel here with Lance Browning of Tyler, Texas. Lance, pleasure to see you. And we have guests today. Yes, we do, Garrett. Yeah. So try to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.
Parts, not just real high. Okay. But I have a good friend I've worked with, Marcy Johnson. She is an elder care attorney specialist over, over in Dallas. Worked with her and her dad.
It's a family firm. It's a mother daughter operation with the Johnson firm over in Dallas. And Marcy's here to talk to us about elder care law, long term care planning, Medicaid, veterans benefits, et cetera. So take it away, Marcie.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Thank you, Lance. And I just want to thank you so much for allowing me to be on your show and just to talk about something that's real passionate to my heart and that I feel like I can really help other families achieve and navigate and that's long term care. So what I want to do, I'm going to share my screen.
So when we talk about long term care, you know, we plan for a lot of things, different things in our life. We plan for births and we plan for graduation.
We plan for that first, hopefully you know, that marriage and then retirement. But one of the big life's biggest events that we don't plan for is long term care. And so what I want to do today is just kind of introduce you is some of the conversations that I have with my clients and families on different options when looking about how we might pay for long term care. This is my information here just to tell you where I'm located. But there's really three ways to pay for long term care. And they're not exclusive, but the three ways that generally that we look at when we've got to pay is we can either private pay, you can get long term care insurance to help pay, or we can look at some governmental programs. What I want to do today is just kind of break out and flesh out some of these different options. And the first one that we think about is, well, just private pay. I'll pay for it. Or maybe you're lucky enough to have a rich child or other family member and they're going to take care of you so we can look at what's that going to cost. But I invite you to consider the cost. If you haven't navigated the long term care costs at this point, let me give you a synopsis of what that looks like.
So this is a survey put out by Genworth and it's done every year and it gives you the averages of cost of care in your area. Now I picked Dallas because that's where I'm located.
And just quickly, just to read off the screen here, I mean if you're looking at assisted living right now you're looking at about $5,500 a month, which is about 66,000 a year.
For nursing home, it's 6,000, I'm rounding here, but 6,000amonth or 72,000 annually.
Now remember, these are averages. So there's a lot of nursing homes that cost a lot more than 6,000. Same with some assisted living facilities. They're going to cost a lot more than 5,500. But this is the average.
So look at that cost. You know, for a nursing home, semi private room, that's 72,000 a year. The average stay in a nursing home is about three years. So think about that. So three times 72,000, you know, what does that look like?
And then think about your nest egg and think about, okay, I've spent my entire lifetime building up these assets.
Look how fast they could dwindle down.
And remember, this is just for one person.
If you're married, you've still got the healthy spouse that's living in a home. You've got home expenses in there, livelihood expenses. So cost of care. Yeah, most people think I'll pay for it myself, but can you really? Or, or if you can, how long can you pay? And so again this, these numbers aren't to be a Debbie Downer, it's just to be realistic and say, okay, cost of care is expensive, so what can we do to position how we can pay for it?
So if you don't have the funds to pay these types of prices or you don't that special loved one in your life who has volunteered to take care of you for the duration of your life, then what do you do?
So I go back to that slide here. Then you know, we've got to look at some other options. Another option is long term care insurance.
Now when is the best time to buy insurance?
I'm sure Lance and others will tell you it was yesterday. And so it's always going to be more expensive the longer you wait and that's not a sales tactic, it's just the truth. As we get older, there's more of a chance of us having an injury or an illness and it just becomes more expensive.
But I encourage you to look at long term care insurance and see if it's an option. A lot of people think, oh, it's super expensive and it, and it can be relatively expensive, but if you paid a, an annual premium of 6,000 a year for a long term care policy, well, if you didn't have that long term care policy, you'd be paying 6,000amonth. So maybe that $6,000 annual premium doesn't look so bad.
So it's just really, I'm just trying to put things in perspective. But I encourage you to reach out to, if you're interested in long term care insurance, to talk to Lance or someone like Lance, because there are some really cool tools out there now. And it's not just straight long term care insurance. There are some products that if you need long term care, your investment can double and triple in value. And so these are real legitimate tools that can make a phenomenal difference in someone's life. Again, these options that I'm giving you are not exclusive. So maybe we private pay and we get long term care insurance or maybe we private pay and look at governmental programs so all these can work in combination together. But if you're in a situation in which either the premiums for long term care insurance don't make sense or you've had a health event that keeps you from being insurable, then is that the end of the story? And I would say no, that's not the end of the story. There are still some other options we can look at.
And two of those options are Medicaid and VA pension.
And so what I want to do here is flesh out Medicaid because a lot of people, when I mention Medicaid, they automatically turn me off because they have these preconceived ideas of what Medicaid does and doesn't do.
And it can really be a lifesaver for so many families. And a lot of people qualify that wouldn't ordinarily think that they qualify.
So Medicaid is a federal program that's governed by the states and so each state is different. So if you've done your, your Google review of what Medicaid, how to get qualified for Medicaid, you don't know which state you're looking at when you do that Google search. So I encourage you, if you're interested at all in any of these programs to talk to, to an expert in that area.
Now, I don't want you to rely too heavily on, I've got a lot of information on some slides I'm about to give you.
But if you want to do a deep dive into some of these topics, I have on my website, which is johnsonfirm.com Free downloads of books that I write and update annually that provide all this detailed information. So today is just a, you know, a 30,000 foot view. But if you want to delve into the specifics, I definitely have those resources that you can look at.
But why would you want to look at Medicaid? So let's look at this semi private room. So that's $6,000 a month for nursing home care. If you could get on Medicaid, the way the Medicaid program would work is that you would pay your income, whatever your income is that you receive a month. Let's say you get Social Security of $2,000.
So you would pay your Social Security towards your cost of care. So you're paying $2,000.
Medicaid would pick up the difference. So they would pay the other $4,000 so that you could stay in that semi private room.
And now you're in a semi private room most of the time on Medicaid, you can't get your own room. You have a roommate. But just think about it, your roommate may be private, paying $6,000 a month.
You're on Medicaid, you're only paying $2,000 a month. You're eating the same food, you've got the same nurse, you're getting the same care.
So Medicaid is just a billing issue. So why wouldn't we look at Medicaid if we could get the same care at a, at a less of a price for the family?
So that being said, let's flesh out some of the rules and the myths about Medicaid and why you might want to look at it.
So the first myth, and the one that I hear the most often is myth number one. If my spouse or I go into a nursing home on Medicaid, we're going to receive substandard care.
And the truth of that is it's just not true.
Medicaid is just a billing issue. It's not a health issue. And like I said just a while ago, usually you're in a semi private room. So you've got two people in a room.
You're not wearing a scarlet letter that says I'm on Medicaid. It's just a billing issue. In fact, the nurses don't know. Only the business office knows how the billing works. And so you're not in an offshoot wing of the nursing home that has dim lighting and you know, peeled, peeled up floors. And I encourage you to realize that nursing homes don't look like the nursing homes of maybe what our grandparents dealt with in the 70s and 80s.
There's been a lot of renovations and legislation to make sure that nursing homes meet a certain standard of care. And so I encourage you to go look at some nursing homes. But it's not the doom and gloom that we have in our nightmares. There's a lot of really nice nursing homes here in Dallas and they take Medicaid, so you're not going to get substandard care. It's just a billing issue, it's not a health issue. Myth number two, I got to spend on all my assets until I'm broke to qualified for Medicaid. Well, the truth is, with proactive planning, you may be able to protect a majority of your assets.
And we're going to talk about that just in a minute. But there are some rules. And when you look at the Medicaid rules online, you'll see, okay, I can't have more than $2,000. Well, that is just one piece of the rules. And so again, I encourage you, when you look at Google, you're not seeing the whole story. So there are a lot of things that are not countable that Medicaid doesn't look at.
And we'll go into this in a minute, but Medicaid doesn't look at your house, the value of your home. IRAs are exempt, cars are exempt, or a car is exempt. So you may can only have $2,000 worth of assets, but you can have all these other things. I've had clients with 7, $800,000 who have qualified for Medicaid and we haven't done anything tricky. It's just you've got to know the rules. And depending on what your assets are, if the bulk of your assets are in non countable assets, then you could have quite a bit of money and qualify for Medicaid.
So just know you do not have to go broke in order to qualify for some of these programs. Now myth number three, if I give away my assets, I have to wait 60 months to qualify for Medicaid. And the truth of that is Medicaid looks back 60 months. But this is not a penalty period.
The actual wait can be shorter or much longer. So the way Medicaid works is when you apply for Medicaid, they look back 60 months and they say, what did you do with your money? Did you give anything away? Because the presumption is if you give it away, then you were trying to defraud Medicaid and so they're going to penalize you for that. So when we apply for Medicaid, we just make sure that when they look back 60 months, they're not going to see any gifts. So that opens a lot of opportunity for us because we can do whatever we want to with our assets outside that 60 month look back period. So did you give things away 60 months? Within 60 months? No. But what about 61 months? Well, maybe. And if you did, that's okay because Medicaid's not going to look at that. So like I said, if, if you are interested in talking about Medicaid, just like with insurance, the sooner you plan, there might be some more opportunities to protect your assets than waiting longer. Myth number four, I can give away $19,000 per person without penalty. And the truth of that is, is that Medicaid does not follow the IRS rules. So that is true under IRS rules, but Medicaid doesn't follow the IRS rules. So if you give away $19,000 per person without penalty, yes, you don't have to report that to the irs, but you will be penalized for that under the Medicaid rules. So again, when you look at the rules online, it doesn't tell the whole story.
And then finally, our final myth I'm going to talk about today is, you know what, there's just a small chance I'm going to end up in a nursing home anyway, so we really don't need to talk about this. And you, the truth is that 70% of people 65 or older will have a nursing home event sometime in their life. Hopefully you're one of the 30% that won't need nursing home. But the odds are stacked that, that we may need it. So that's just why it's so important, like all of the milestones that we have in our lives that we talk about long term care, because we might end up there. And so again, I just want to offer you different avenues in which you can pay for it. So hopefully the point of going over these myths was just to dispel, take away some of that fear of the program. But let's delve into some of the specifics about the program.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Now.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: If you do not need nursing home now or within the next three or four years, these eligibility Requirements aren't that important for you to study and focus.
So it's more just an overview so you know what to expect down the road. However, these rules are extremely important. If we are applying for Medicaid now, and I'm not going to read everything on these slides again, you can get that information, you can read them on your own, or you can look at some of my online books that explain this in more detail. But the point of Medicaid is when I talk about Medicaid, I'm talking about just skilled nursing Medicaid. There are over 20 or 30 different Medicaid programs. There's food stamps, there's aid for unwed mothers, there's all these different governmental programs. But when we talk, when I'm talking about Medicaid, I am just talking about skilled nursing Medicaid. Medicaid to pay for long term care really only covers skilled nursing Medicaid. So if you're in an assisted living facility, Medicaid will not help you pay for that care. There is an exception, it's very limited. It's called the STAR plus waiver program, which is above and beyond this conversation. But as a general rule, you've got to need help with at least three activities of daily living before Medicaid is going to pay for your care. And that's just a coin phrase. If you're not familiar with Medicaid or with activities of daily living, there's five core activities and depending on how many you can't perform, kind of determines what level of care you need. So that's eating, dressing, bathing, standing and walking and toileting.
So to, to get Medicaid you gotta, you gotta need the help of someone else to provide for your care. And then there's an income test. Medicaid looks at how much income you receive. And so there's a limit, they put a cap on how much income you can have. And again, these numbers change every year. So we're here in November. So for 2025, the number right now is $2,901 in gross income. And gross is a key word there because a lot of people look at their, let's say Social Security and what hits their bank account. So if you get $2,000 hitting your bank account every month in Social Security, that's actually your net income, that's not your gross because Medicare part B or D, if you're taking advantage of those programs, is taken out before it reaches your bank account. So that's not your gross amount that you're receiving. And so That's a big mistake a lot of people make is they think, oh, well, I'm under the 2901.
Well, but they're counting the net income, not the gross. So there's an income test. And so you've got to be under this amount. Now, if you're not under this amount, there's things that we can do so that you would still qualify. And that's called a Miller's Trust. And that's just a requirement for Medicaid that says it will allow you to apply for Medicaid and be approved for Medicaid even if your income is over the gross amount. But you've got to have a contract with the bank that says all your overage will go to the nursing home.
So if you don't have that Miller Trust in place when you apply, you will be denied. It's an easy fix. But again, that's something that needs to be addressed before you actually apply. One other thing I want to point out here is that if you are married and one of you goes into the nursing home, this is you have the most wide variety of options available to you because the healthy spouse can have unlimited income.
So even though the one going in the nursing home can only have 2901, the one that's not in the nursing home can have unlimited income. So that opens a whole lot of opportunities for us that if we have too many assets, well, maybe we can convert those to an income stream, because you can have a limited income. So it's another way to think outside the box. And again, I'm going back to the same statement that the numbers that you see on Google do not tell the whole story. And then you have an asset test. So the three tests, the health test, the income test, and the asset test. And if you are single, you can only have $2,000 in countable assets.
But we'll go over that again. That countable word is key because a lot of things aren't accountable. So, 2000 and countable, if you're married, you can have a range. You can have a range. And again, that changes every year, but you're looking at about 157,000 in countable assets as the max. But again, spoiler alert, if we have more than that, maybe we can convert it to an income stream, or maybe we can purchase some exempt assets. So there are legitimate methods to position yourself to qualify if you're not qualified today.
So what's a countable asset? What really? It's anything that you can readily turn into cash to pay for the cost of care. So they're going to cut your bank account, your investment accounts, life insurance, any real estate that's other than your homestead. They will count IRAs and 401ks count if you are under 72 and a half. Okay, but what's not countable? Your homestead's not countable. As long as the value of that home, I want to say it's 700, it's about 770,000 in equity right now. So as long as the equity is under that number, which changes every year, then it's not countable. Your personal belongings don't count. Your car doesn't count, any type of car.
So again, maybe if we need to spin down, we upgrade your vehicle from a Ford Explorer to a Cadillac Escalade, you know, so there are options there. Your IRAs, a lot of people don't realize this, that your IRAs can be exempt if you are taking the RMD. So if you're over 72 and a half, the principal in your IRA is not countable. So just to kind of play this out, you look at the rules. You can only have $2,000 in countable assets if you're single. Well, like I said earlier, well, that doesn't include your home. If it's under $770,000 in equity, maybe you've got a $300,000 IRA.
Well, if you're over 72 and a half, that's not going to be countable. So you're not necessarily broke and you're applying for Medicaid because 2,000 countable, but you've got all these non countable assets that Medicaid doesn't look at. And Medicaid sets these rules. So we're not setting these rules. Medicaid sets these rules and they have chosen not to count these assets.
So cardinal rule, if you don't remember anything else today, do not apply until you know you qualify.
A lot of people will apply for Medicaid before they have spent down or before their assets are in range and they will always be denied.
You have to be within these limits before you apply.
And I encourage you to always use an expert when applying for these programs. I had someone last week who, she used the social worker at the nursing home to apply for Medicaid. And it takes about 65 days to get approval once you apply. And they were denied. And the reason they were denied is because the Medicaid applicant had too much income.
Now it's an easy fix because I can just do a Miller's Trust and We do a contract with the bank saying, okay, we'll give all of our income to the nursing home to pay for our care. But the social worker didn't know that that's what was needed. And so it ended up costing the family two months worth of nursing home costs because now they thought they were applying for Medicaid and it would cover two months, that 65 days.
And it didn't. They got denied. So now they owe the nursing home $12,000 and they got to reapply again.
But if they had just gone to an elder law attorney, Elder law attorney should know that if you have more income than allowed by program realtors, you got to do a Miller trust. And sometimes you get what you pay for. So I know that going to an expert, sometimes you have to pay for those.
But it is money well spent if it allows you to get where you need to be quickly.
So I encourage anyone to, if you're interested in this, to talk to an expert about it. But you never apply, ever apply, until you know you qualify. So what do we do if we've got too much?
Well, if we've got too much income, the main way to solve that problem is through a Miller's trust. There's some other things here that we could talk about, but that's the main one. If you've got too many assets, well, like I said, maybe you can convert some of those assets to an income stream if you're married because the healthy spouse can have unlimited income. But if we've got too many assets and that's not an option, maybe we look at doing an asset protection trust. The great thing about a Medicaid asset protection trust is, is it will protect those assets from being counted if they're in this trust for over five years. Now a lot of people will say, well, you know what, I can just give, if I've got to wait five years, I'll just give my money to my kids and wait five years and then apply for benefits. And that strategy may work. It could work.
But if anything happens in your kids lives where they get sued, they have a divorce, they have creditor problems, they could potentially, they don't mean to, but they could potentially lose that money for you.
So I think a better way to protect those assets is to put it in a trust.
And this trust is managed usually by the kids, but you take the bulk of money, whatever you want to protect, whatever is over the Medicaid rules amount, we move that to this trust and then we let sit there for five years. So Then when we apply for Medicaid, Medicaid asks, have you made any gifts within the last five years? You say, nope, I haven't. You made a gift five years and two months ago. But they're not allowed to see that time period. So if you have time on your hands, this is a way to protect those assets and also make sure that they're there for the family if you ever need them at a later time or upon your death.
So that is the Medicaid Asset Protection Trust and we utilize a lot of those. So if you think that you might want to prepare for Medicaid in the future, and we don't think that we're going to need nursing home at least five years, it's a, it's a good option to look into to see if it makes sense for your family. So that's really all I wanted to talk about with Medicaid. Again, I encourage you to look at my book online if you want to learn more.
So let's switch gears slightly. And I want to talk about VA pension.
And now this is specifically for veterans. So if anyone here knows a veteran, if you are a veteran, or if you have a family member that's a veteran, there's a really cool governmental program out there that a lot of people just don't know about that can help pay for your long term care.
And so it's specifically meant for veterans who had wartime service and it's tax free money to help pay for their cost of care. And the reason why it pays for your cost of care is because you're showing the VA that you don't really have enough money to pay for your care long term. And so the VA as a reward for your service, will provide tax free money for the rest of your life to help pay for that care. And the way that you apply is you need to talk to a VA accredited attorney to help you with that process to see if you're eligible.
And so quickly we're just going to go over the requirements for the VA pension.
Now, VA pension is different than VA compensation.
So why would you want to look at the VA pension?
Well, again, I'll show you in a minute that the VA could pay you if you're married, up to 28 or $30,000 tax free a year, which can be a game changer for a lot of my families to allow them to stay at home and not need not go to the nursing home or not go to assisted living, they can pay for at home care.
So if you're a surviving spouse, we're looking at about 15,000 annually for the rest of your life. So that's why, if you're eligible for this program, you ought to look at it. Now, like I said, there's two different types of programs. There's compensation, which most people are familiar with, which pays for if you got hurt during your time in service. So you get a disability rating.
This is different than that program. Now, you can only get one or the other. Whichever one pays more. But if you are a veteran or, you know, a veteran who's getting compensation, if they're getting 70 to 80% disability rating, if they're 70 or 80% are lower, they ought to look at the pension because they might get more.
So for this pension program, who is a veteran? Well, it's someone who served 90 days active duty, and one of those days was during a time of war, and they were honorably discharged. Now, that doesn't mean that they actually had to have boots on the ground or that they were in combat. It just means that there was a war going on at some point in the world that the United States was involved in.
Now, here are those wartime dates, and they are specific. They are very specific as to what those dates are. I encourage you to look at your discharge papers or a lot of separation papers. Sometimes they're called a dd214.
That's the form dd214, and that'll give you the exact dates. So all we're looking for is 90 days active duty and one day fit within these timeframes and honorably discharged.
So if you meet the service requirements, then we can look at the other requirements.
Virginia has an asset test very similar to Medicaid in that you can have 159,000 in countable assets. And again, this number is going to change as well with each year with the cost of living adjustment. But that does not include your house, your car, your personal effects. Okay. And this is for a single or a married couple. So married you can have 159,000. If you're single, you can have 159,000 accountable. The income test is the test that if you have applied for VA benefits in the past and you got denied, this is usually why if you applied for VA pension before 2018, the numbers were very different.
They revamped the program in 2018. So if you. If you applied before 2018 and were denied, you got to look at again.
But the income test is where most people fail.
So in the income test, we have to show that your income from all sources is less than your unreimbursed medical expenses paid.
So that means we, we count up your Social Security, your pension, your IRA distributions, all your other recurring income.
And then we look at your unreimbursed medical, your health insurance premiums, your long term care insurance premiums, if you had them, maybe you're paying a caregiver or you're in assisted living or even nursing home. We look at the costs, the price of each.
And if your assisted living cost is higher than your income, you meet the test. So as an example, if you're bringing in $2,000 in income and you're paying assisted living 5,500 in order to live there, easy math, 5,500 is more than 2,000.
And so you meet the income test. But this is where a lot of people fail because they say, well, I don't have a lot of income, I only get $2,000 in Social Security. But they don't have the unreimbursed medical expenses. So if that is your issue, there are things we can do to help alleviate that and see if we can't get you qualified.
And then like Medicaid, there's a health test. Now, when you apply for va, you always want the highest pension amount given, which is called aid and attendance. So with aid and attendance, you need help with at least two activities of daily living, which is that same order of health activities. But unlike skilled nursing and for Medicaid where you need three, for VA pension, you only need two. And with VA pension, we can think outside the box here. You may say, well, I don't need help with VA bathing, but I would argue if you have holders bars in the shower in which you hold on to steady yourself, or maybe you sit down in the shower because you just get winded or dizzy, that's needing help with bathing.
If you need help standing or walking, maybe you use a walker or a cane.
That is obviously help with standing and walking. So I had a lady not too long ago that she was on a walker and I said, well, do you need help with any activities of daily living? She says, no, I can do it all on my own. She was on a walker, but she was completely independent. And so the test here is not can you do it by yourself? The test is, could you use the assistance of something or someone in order to make life easier?
So that's the health test.
Now why would you want to look at the VA pension? Because if you're married, the annual tax free amount that you could receive for the rest of Your life this year is $33,548. And if you're single veteran, 28,300.
Now, I don't know about you, but I sure would like to get.
I could do a lot with an extra $33,000 a year, tax free.
But for my families who are veterans, like I said, it's a game changer. It can mean the difference between being able to stay at home and have a caregiver come in versus having to put them in assisted living. And so unfortunately, the VA just doesn't really talk about this program very much. And there's a lot of misconceptions because the rules were so different before 2018, that if you haven't looked at it, or like I said, if you were denied earlier, it's worth looking at again.
Now, if you're a surviving spouse, you can also be eligible for these benefits.
The rules for getting what's called the death pension as a surviving spouse is you had to be married to the veteran at the time of his or her death.
You did not have to be married to them at the time they had their service requirement, but you just had to be married to them at the time of death. You haven't remarried, and the deceased veteran meets all the service requirements. And again, if you're a surviving spouse, it's about half of what a veteran receives. But $18,000 definitely can make a difference and your loved one's life for sure.
So what do you do if you do not qualify? Well, if you're missing the service requirements, there's really nothing we can do. I can't recreate your service requirements. However, we still can look at those other options. We can look at long term care insurance. We can look at maybe planning for Medicaid. But the VA unfortunately will not be an option for us.
If you got too many assets, depends on how much you had too much. If we've only got 15 or $20,000 much, well, maybe we go buy an exempt asset or we spend down our, you know, we pay off our debt. There are lots of things that we can do. If we are considerably over the 159,000, then maybe we consider that a VA asset protection trust, which is similar to the Medicaid Asset Protection Trust. The difference here is if you move assets to this VA trust, you only have to wait three years before you can apply instead of the five.
But the benefit of this trust is that it also works for Medicaid. So if you moved assets into this trust and waited three years, you could apply for VA and have that tax free money coming in for at least two years. And if your health ever declined such that you ever needed skilled nursing, then you could switch to Medicaid and everything that you move to this trust five, six, seven years ago would be protected and Medicaid would not see those assets. And again, I just want to reiterate, we're not saying we're hiding assets, we are protecting assets. And these are all Medicaid and VA rules. They're very familiar with these trusts. If they didn't like the rules, they would change them. So we're just following their rules and they only look back three years and five years. So if we do anything outside of that window that they're not going to ask us about them. If you've got too much income, and like I said, that's the one where most people fail. If we've got too much income, maybe we increase your medical expenses. And one of the easiest things that we can do for that is to pay a caregiver.
Now if you've got a loved one, a family member who is coming in and checking in on you, if you, if they are taking you, your son or daughter is taking you to the grocery store, they're taking you to your doctor's appointments, they're checking in on you, they may have a, you know, an ethical obligation to look after you, but they don't have a legal obligation to look after you. And so we can create a contract in which you pay them for the things that they're already doing. And so that's an easy way to create unreimbursed medical expenses that maybe were not there before they were doing the service. We just weren't paying them for it. So we do a lot of caregiver agreements in our office.
Now if you don't need any help, then it's just important to know what these rules are and maybe position your assets so that if you ever do get to a point where you need long term care, that you're that much closer to becoming financially eligible in order to apply. Now I know I went through all that super, super fast and Lance, you know, and we've done workshops in the past, I can talk about this for hours.
And so, and I, you know, I just appreciate the time. I tried to make this a 30,000foot view.
But the takeaway I would say as I talk to families is that there are options for you and whatever way you want to go or not go at all. Education is key and you just need to talk to somebody and know what's available for your family.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: Amen. Marcie, thanks so much. If you would like to get in touch with Marcy, obviously you can just contact us. Call the office here, we'll get you and you know, a call, zoom, whatever meeting with Marcy. Happy to help.
Direct Line here at Income Solutions Wealth Management, 9037-8789-0990-3787-8903.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Thank you.
Lancepedia is for entertainment and educational purposes only. The views and opinions expressed in the show are that of Lance Browning and are not guaranteed to come to fruition. If you have questions about your investments or your financial plans, you should seek a financial professional or give Lance a call at 903-778-78916. We thank you again for watching or listening to the podcast, and we'll see you next time.
