You wrote about qualifying my parents for Medicaid with a trust that would require them to give up control of our farm. Is that really necessary?

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Not necessarily. With the right trust, plus other legal tools depending on your parents’ situation, nothing in their lives will change.

Turning over the farm to a trustee may feel like a big step, but we’ve helped many families navigate it successfully. A Medicaid trust can keep the farm in the family and help pay for long-term care. This kind of trust puts the right protections in place, and your parents can go about their daily lives just like they always have. We will create an estate plan to keep them comfortable without significant sacrifice.

Now this is not something that should be tried without our guidance. People often come in with trusts taken from the internet, or that have been created by someone who lacks sufficient experience in the elder law field. Those trusts might be fine for estate planning purposes, but they fail to meet Medicaid’s strict requirements. Benefits will be denied or delayed if trusts give the people who created them too much power over trust property. Unfortunately, many families discover, only too late, that the wrong trust doesn’t actually protect them.

The situation does present a paradox: giving up some control can lead to gaining valuable benefits. Your parents’ goal is to secure the farm for the family, and to do that, they entrust a portion of that control to a trusted steward. The farm is no longer at risk of being sold to pay for their care, and the baton can be passed to the next generation. However, without the legal trust that removes the farm from your parents’ names in the first place, there may be no baton left to pass.

We know how to build the right plan, but timing is important. Encourage your parents to talk with us now, before life gets more complicated. A conversation today can give your family peace of mind for years to come.