This site is under construction. Please check back for information that will be provided on this site in the future (planned for the fall of 2011) as well as on companion sites, which are also in progress.
This site and the other websites that will be linked to this site are intended to be used to help attorneys. The attorneys who could benefit from this site will be elder law or special needs law attorneys who concentrate on estate planning for older individuals or those with special needs. Such attorneys will already have experience in working with trusts and public benefits.
We will recap trust and public benefits considerations, but this site is not an intensive training guide.
We hope that the attorneys using the information here will be able to help clients who are working to plan for high quality long term care either for themselves or for another person, such as the individual's spouse or child.
Linked sites will include the following:
Seven Strategies to Stay Home Longer - This site will take a look at key strategies for helping each client maintain his or her home and/or choices. The material is designed to be used in talking with clients about how and when to approach planning to maintain control of one's assets and choices, housing alternatives, driving and transportation alternatives, caregivers and other important people, documents that help one maintain control and/or designate agents, how one may be able to use various resources to promote control and choices, and whether monitoring of some type may become important in one's life in the future.
Special Needs Trusts - This site consists of an overview of special needs trusts, a framework for special needs life care planning, and a lengthy listing of terms that an attorney may encounter when working with special needs trusts. This will be a fee-based site for attorneys. We currently intend to charge $100 for one person for up to one year's access to the site. We believe the information on this site will be the most useful to an attorney who is familiar with special needs planning but needs refresher information. Some attorneys have better memories than others!
Care Costs - The purpose of this site will be to develop frameworks for determining long term care costs. This will not be an exhaustive item-by-item guide but will help attorneys and their clients to get started on budgeting and projecting future costs for one's own care or for the care of another person.
Pooled Trusts - Pooled trusts are becoming more prevalent around the country. The purpose of this site is to provide a brief description of pooled trusts and the different options for using pooled trusts.
Special Needs Life Care Planning - This will be a fee-based site for experienced attorneys to use when working with clients who know they need (and want) more than a special needs trust. The purpose of this site will be to help attorneys (or a staff member or another professional working with the attorney) to put together key information - with the intention of tying the legal planning to social and practical planning for future (or present) day-to-day living needs. No two people are alike. And no two plans are alike.
Elder Law Index - This site, designed to organize references to elder law resources, is a little further down the road.
