When you are considering what you will be able to leave behind to your loved ones after you are gone, you may be overlooking a huge potential expense.
Retirement is viewed as a period of your life when you have a lot of free time to enjoy if you can afford to put your working years behind you. Planning ahead for this interim from a financial perspective will involve evaluating your anticipated ordinary living expenses.
Once you are in a position to meet them, you may feel as though the mission has been accomplished once and for all. However, if you are under this impression, you are seeing an incomplete picture.
Long-Term Care Costs
To be comprehensively prepared, you should consider the twilight period that will inevitably follow the golden years. It is definitely hard to imagine yourself as an octogenarian, but the life expectancy for someone that is turning 67 today is 85 years for a man, and 87 years for a woman.
Alzheimer’s disease strikes approximately 40% of individuals that are 85 years of age and older, and this is not the only cause of incapacity. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, 35% of all senior citizens will reside in nursing homes at some point in time.
Clearly, this is a very real threat that everyone should face head on. If you are thinking that you are not too concerned about the financial part of the equation because you will qualify for Medicare, we have some bad news to pass along.
This program does not pay for custodial care, which is the type of assistance that you would receive in a nursing home. In the greater Los Angeles area, you can expect to pay somewhere in the vicinity of $120,000 for year in a nursing home at minimum.
If you are married, your family should be prepared to address two different rounds of nursing home costs. It should be noted that the average length of stay for nursing home residents is one year.
Depending on the extent of your resources, if these expenses present themselves, everything that you intended to leave to your loved ones could going into the coffers of a nursing home.
Medi-Cal Can Provide a Solution
You don’t necessarily have to resign yourself to paying out-of-pocket for as long as you can, because there is a widely embraced solution in the form of the Medi-Cal program. It will pay for long-term care if you can gain eligibility, but this is easier said than done, because it is a need-based program.
There is an asset limit of just $2000, but some things do not count, including your home. When a married person is applying for Medi-Cal to pay for long-term care, the healthy spouse is entitled to maintain a certain amount of property as well.
The situation is not necessarily a gloom and doom scenario, because you can actually divest yourself of assets that do count before you apply. However, timing is key, because you have to complete all gift giving at least 30 months before you submit your application.
Free Report on Choosing a Nursing Home
If you would like to obtain some important information about nursing home selection, we have a great resource that you can access right here on this website. Our attorneys have prepared an in-depth special report on the subject, and it is being offered free of charge.
You can check it out right now if you click the following link: Free Nursing Home Report.
Schedule a Consultation Today!
We are here to help if you would like to discuss nursing home asset protection strategies with a knowledgeable elder law attorney. You can send us a message to request a consultation appointment, and we can be reached by phone at 310-337-7696.
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