By Monet Binder, Esq. Is it possible to protect the family home if a loved one needs long term care in a nursing home facility?  If you are like most of us, you want to preserve your assets, which you have worked a lifetime to acquire, and keep your home in the family either by passing it along or selling it and distributing the proceeds to your own children and/or grandchildren. Here in New York City, the average cost of long-term care in a nursing home is over $140,000 per year.  According to Healthday.com, a new study shows, “More than half of Americans will find themselves in a nursing home at some point in their lives”. If you haven’t taken steps to protect your assets, you may find yourself in a position of having to spend all of your money for the cost of care, or spend your money to reach the point to qualify for Medicaid – to cover the cost of your long-term care. But it doesn’t necessarily end there. In order to recover the expenses paid on your behalf for nursing home care, you may be forced to sell your home or lose it through Medicaid estate recovery, whereby Medicaid places a lien on the home upon your death, to recover the amount expended for your care. Planning Options To Protect Your Home The good news is that by planning early and making good choices, you can keep your home in the family.  Transferring Ownership. Some people believe that if they transfer title of their home to their children, or if they add their children’s name to their deed, they can automatically pass on the ownership of the property to their children after they pass away.  This may or may not be true.   Considering the statistical likelihood of a healthcare crisis happening is very great and the odds increase the older you get, if one or both parents require nursing home care for many people, Medicaid will most likely be the method of payment. Transferring ownership or adding names to the deed will be considered a gift.  Because Medicaid has a five-year review period in which it considers all gifts, ie. uncompensated transfers, deed transfers to children, or anyone else, can prevent applicants from qualifying. Removing Parents from the deed.   A better option would be to remove the parents’ names entirely from the deed, if the parents are young and healthy enough where the need for nursing home care for five years into the future would be highly unlikely. As with any valuable asset, transferring the property to a child or another individual is risky.  You need to be confident that the person receiving the asset won’t take over and use the asset solely for their own purposes, which may be contrary to your wishes.  Also, if anything happens to the recipient, any creditor or claimant will not care that the asset or family home was placed in the recipient’s name for someone else’s safekeeping. Consider a situation where Harold gifted his home to his son Sam after his wife passed away.  If Sam was in a car accident and the cost of care for injuries sustained from the collision exceeded what the insurance company provided, the home any other valuable assets could be used […]

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