Video Summary
What is advanced healthcare planning? That is whenever someone is concerned about their particularly going into a nursing home and how are they going to have it paid for. So when do your planning, one of the tools that you could use is to check to see what the cost is as far as nursing, home insurance. And the cost of nursing homes is like $8,000 to $10,000 a month. And so you would need to see about planning ahead. So if you needed to go in a nursing home, how it would be paid if you don’t have that money and basically wouldn’t be able to afford it. The other thing is, is to plan to have what they call Medicaid pay for your healthcare planning. And there you would need to talk to an elder law lawyer who then could assist you as far as setting your estate up so that, and plan for that on how to title your assets under the Medicaid guidelines. And so that way that if you would have to go into skilled nursing care, you could preserve some of your assets for whoever you leave behind, particularly your homestead. So the healthcare planning also includes, well, who do you want to leave in charge of doing this? I usually prepare in conjunction with estate plans as far as healthcare planning, is to prepare a living will, which designates someone to be able to disconnect life support, also prepare what they call a healthcare surrogate for someone to be able to make healthcare decisions in the future. Also a durable power of attorney and hopefully that would avoid having to go through a guardianship. And you can also designate what they call a standby guardian to designate who you’d want to be your guardian in the event that you would become incapacitated and need a guardian appointed. If you have any questions concerning this, give me a call at (727) 847-2288.