Planning for the future and ensuring that your wishes will be carried out doesn’t have to keep you up at night. If you or your loved one is 60+, now is a good time to plan your legal strategies to receive care in your home as you desire and if you may need expensive long-term care. If you have plans in place, we will review them with you and suggest modifications or additions, if any, for you to accomplish your goals.

Elder law and estate planning serve two different, but equally vital, functions. The main difference is that elder law is focused on ensuring your care and preserving your assets during your lifetime, while estate planning concentrates on what happens to your assets after you die.

Elder law planning is concerned with ensuring that seniors live long, healthy, and financially secure lives. It usually involves anticipating future medical needs, including long-term care. Elder law services include planning for the expected and the unexpected: pre-need planning and crisis planning. Planning is tailored to each client’s concerns, goals, family dynamics, and immediate or potential future care needs and may include planning tools such as:

Elder law planning also includes your instructions about living arrangements and priorities when it comes to care, which benefits your entire family. What’s more, it can ensure that you are protected from elder abuse or exploitation when you get older or become incapacitated. For seniors, this means resting assured that you will not be a burden to your children, siblings, or other family members if/when you are not able to care for yourselves. For other family members, your planning manifests your love for them, providing peace of mind and the tools needed to ensure care is provided as planned.

Finally, elder law covers assistance with guardianship and conservatorship, if needed. Guardianship and/or conservatorship may be necessary to protect and provide for individuals who are unable to care for themselves or live independently, who are unable to understand or manage money and assets, and who may be at risk of abuse and exploitation. Supported Decision Making may be an alternative to guardianship/conservatorship for individuals with limited abilities to retain their decision-making capacity by choosing supporters to help them make choices.

When planning proactively, Ashley Day Law works with you to determine your priorities and what future needs must be met and put together the best course of action based on your income and assets to protect your quality of life and reduce unnecessary stress within the family.

When crisis planning, our caring and comprehensive approach can help guide you through a difficult process and relieve you of some of your worries.

Having to place a loved one in a skilled nursing facility can be an emotionally wrenching experience. To make matters worse, confusion often reigns supreme when determining how to best use income and assets and when navigating the Medicaid application process. Well-meaning family, friends, and even professional advisers may give conflicting or incomplete advice causing families needlessly to lose their property and assets. At Ashley Day Law, we will help you plan for future care needs and how to pay for them, prepare documents for you to enact your plan, and assist with the administration to ensure plans are implemented and assets distributed as instructed.

You want to do what is best for the people you love throughout your lifetime and ensure they are taken care of after you are gone. Give us a call. We’re here to help.

Elder Law

Plan for Peace of Mind