"Should we put our house in our kids' names?" "Should we put our CD's in our kids' names?" Those are questions we always get because families want to find out what they need to do to qualify for Louisiana's long term care Medicaid program if they ever go into a nursing home.
We start with the fact that there's a penalty period. It’s a time period penalty. If you ever take anything out of your name, you're going to be penalized from being eligible for Medicaid for a certain period of time. Here's the complicated mathematical calculation. Let's say mom transferred $80,000 to her daughter. She’s going to be penalized for being eligible for Medicaid for 20 months. You divide the amount transferred ($80,000) by 4,000 which is a special Louisiana number. Do that calculation. For 20 months mom is ineligible for Medicaid. When does that 20 months start? Well it doesn’t start when mom did the transfer. It starts when mom is in the nursing home because she's ill and she has no other assets. She would qualify for Medicaid except for the fact that she had made this transfer. So that’s when the 20 months begins. So be aware of that. The Medicaid manual is complicated and there’s more to it than that.
If you plan ahead, ideally, 5 years before you go in to a nursing home you can really protect the family’s entire life savings. So if you want to plan in advance and protect what you have for your family you may want to talk to us 866-491-3884. Read through all the other posts in this blog and get yourself familiar with some of the things that you can do and you'll be ready to act once you get in touch with us to get things protected. I’m Paul Rabalais and have a great day.
