Estate Planning in Iowa
When in a nursing home, you may be unable to manage your financial affairs or even make medical decisions for yourself. If you do not take advanced steps to prepare for this, your family is left to petition the court for authority to act on your behalf. But these actions are limited. Courts typically do not give anyone authority to do asset protection planning on your behalf.
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The best move is to work with our estate planning lawyer in Iowa and put basic estate planning documents in place that give the people you want the authority they need to make decisions for you – when you need it most.
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Any good estate plan would include a power of attorney for finances that would allow someone you trust to help manage your affairs and protect your assets from the Medicaid 4 You spend-down. Additionally, you will want to designate someone to make medical decisions for you if you are unable to make them on your own.
What Documents Do You Need?
As part of the process, you may need a last will and testament, a living trust, or some type of advanced trust, such as an asset protection trust, which will also allow you to maintain greater control over your assets and give you protection against the Medicaid spend-down and inheritance taxes.
Additionally, many of these documents need to be updated once a spouse goes into a nursing home to avoid an unintentional spenddown of martial assets if the healthy spouse should die first or to name someone other than the institutional spouse if they are the only person named as an agent or medical surrogate in an existing power of attorney.
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To determine which documents will help you the best, book a free consultation.