Articles Tagged with Houston Long-Term Care Planning

Baby feetLearning that your family will include a special needs child dramatically changes the narrative for families and most don't know what to expect, from providing care to financial planning. The New York Daily News explores the financial planning that needs to take place in "How to prepare a financial plan for families with special needs children."

Experts estimate that raising a child to age 18 costs roughly $250,000 and those parents of children with disabilities and special needs will have costs that could be as much as 10 times more. With these types of financial challenges, here are some key areas to focus on to protect and grow your money.

  • Assemble a team of experts. That team should include an elder law attorney, doctor, accountant, and government benefits specialist to help you understand Social Security, Medicaid, and other state and federal government programs;

Self-management_senior_swimmingThere is an expression among elder law attorneys called being "elderproofed," according to the Huffington Post in "Writing an Eldercare Plan." This takes planning to the next level, and includes things like how the person wises to be cared for, medical treatment preferences, whether they want to be cared for at home or in a facility, and more. These cover the day-to-day decisions to ensure that desires are followed once a person is unable to make those decisions known.

It's very important for seniors and their loved ones to discuss a care plan for the future before disease or dementia come into play, or a crisis causes eldercare services to become urgently needed. Get the plan drafted while the senior is still fully cognizant and rational. They can be signed when other end-of-life documents are put in place.

In truth, everyone wins with early discussions. When the patient is involved in the decisions for his or her potential care, the family has a better understanding of their preferences and are prepared for tough questions.

Estate libraryPeople put off thinking about or planning to apply for Medicaid because there is nothing pleasant about it, from coming to terms with being ill and impoverished to sharing a nursing home room with a stranger, according to USA Today in "Navigating Medicaid for elder care can be as painful as the ailments." Depending on the policies of your state, you may not be able to spend your final days or years at home.

Up to 30% of Medicaid funding covers long-term care, which is roughly $100 billion annually. More than two-thirds of older adults will require some personal assistance before they pass away, and nearly 50% will need care to such a level that they'd be eligible for private long-term care insurance or Medicaid.

If you want to explore sheltering assets so you can qualify for Medicaid sooner rather than later, then you should talk to a qualified Medicaid attorney. You don't want to be without expert counsel, especially when making hard decisions on how to allocate money you've saved all your life.

Daughter-and-mom-at-computer-300x199The challenges facing seniors and their adult children can be placed into four main categories, according to the article "Talk to aging parents about finances, health care, living arrangements," appearing in The Ventura County Star. They are: finances, living arrangements, medical coverage and estate planning.

Understand your parents' ideas about their future Houston living arrangements when and if they become unable to care for themselves. If they want to stay in their own home, familiarize yourself with the available community resources for support and research alternative living arrangements in the event that remaining at home is no longer a viable option.

Analyze the type of medical coverage your parents have and its coverage. Get the name and telephone number of their primary care physician and any specialist they are seeing. Have a sense of their medical history and condition.

Daughter and motherKeeping all the balls in the air can be a tough juggling act, according to "The Sandwich Generation Juggling Act," from the website Next Avenue. Jugglers know that adding that fourth airborne ball to their juggling routine can be a challenge for most.

Today, we have a societal juggling act going on within the Sandwich Generation of caregivers—the group defined as the 24 million Americans who are juggling children, careers, and caring for an older parent. While many individuals can handle three balls (me, children, career), once the caregiving ball is added, the ball that gets dropped is "me," or the caregiver themselves.

Caregivers should take each ball of responsibility they're juggling and focus on ways to keep that ball moving in a fluid motion. Juggling really only requires getting one ball into the air at a time, so let's look at each one.

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