1 mile west of the Chicago Premium Outlet Mall (800) 810 3100
By Rick Law, J.D., founder and managing partner at the multi-generation law firm of Law Elder Law, home of the Estate Planning Center at Law Elder Law in Aurora, Illinois. Is your caretaker being compensated appropriately for their services? It is important to demonstrate that the caretaker is being paid fair market value, particularly if the caregiver is a relative or friend. Documentation will help fight the presumption that the arrangement is a scheme to cheat Medicaid by passing the senior’s assets to a relative or friend. If adult-child caregivers have moved the affected loved one into their home and need to make some changes within the home, then these changes must be documented as medically necessary if funds for the remodeling will be taken from the elder’s accounts. In addition, caregivers should be advised by the lawyer regarding the extent of authority provided to them for the expenditure of funds.  It does happen that family members serving as caregivers and agents under powers of attorney rationalize an expansion of their authority to dip into the resources of the elder. Your lawyer should provide clear and simple written letters of instruction to the parties involved in a personal-care agreement. For people with Alzheimer’s, the care plan recommendation will state that the caregiver is needed for health care, hygiene, welfare monitoring, nutritional management, and assistance with various activities of daily life. The recommendation will typically end with the statement that “without this care, the patient would require care in a nursing facility.” Most family members are not licensed health-care professionals. A licensed health-care professional, such as a medical doctor, physician’s assistant, or other qualified individual, needs to be in charge of the case management and serve in an oversight capacity. Too many families needlessly lose everything they have.  Don’t let that be you.  If you need help paying the overwhelming cost of long term care, give our office a call at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now, because when you’re out of money, you’re out of options! Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney for the past 8 years in a row by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By Estate Planning Attorney Rick Law.  Rick and his daughter Diana are the lead attorneys at Law Elder Law in the West Chicagoland suburb of Aurora, IL, just off of the Farnsworth exit of the I-88 tollway. A qualified and experienced elder law attorney will customize a personal-care agreement for your loved one as much as possible to make it a powerful document that will stand up to potential legal challenges. A generic contract that simply states that the elder is being provided care is not going to stand up to the scrutiny of either the state’s Medicaid department or the Department of Veterans Affairs. The affected loved one may need to qualify for public benefits; therefore, compliance with the often unfathomable regulations of the Medicaid department and Veterans Affairs must be taken into consideration. This includes specific items to clearly demonstrate what activities of daily living are being provided. Personal-care agreements should incorporate the elder’s answers to questions like, “What do you like to eat? What do you hate to eat? Would you like to rise early or sleep in? How often do you wish to have your hair done?” This level of personalizing the care contract can give a much more persuasive argument if the contract is later challenged. Sample daily log sheets so that the caregiver can record activities on a daily basis should be included by your attorney. Refer the family to a bookkeeping and payroll service to handle the appropriate and timely employment and tax-return filings. On occasion the affected loved one has an adult child who is a nurse, occupational therapist, or other licensed health-care professional who is legally qualified to do more health-care than a typical layperson. In those situations, it is important to draft those health-care details into the agreement so as to provide a legal and contractual basis for a higher level of compensation than could be paid to a nonprofessional. The typical nonprofessional caregiver will be compensated based on the normal regional private-pay rate for a non-skilled in-home care provider. A professional may be compensated at a professional rate for performing a care service within that person’s scope of expertise. It will always be necessary to keep proper records noting the hours worked, as well as the type of care given during those hours. Too many families needlessly lose everything they have.  Don’t let that be you.  If you need help paying the overwhelming cost of long term care, give our office a call at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now, because when you’re out of money, you’re out of options! Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney from 2008-2016 by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By Elder attorney Rick Law of the Estate Planning Center at Law Elder Law, a multi-generation law firm serving seniors and their families in the West suburbs of Chicago, IL. Drafting an interfamilial care agreement is not a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter task. Similar to creating an estate plan, simply pulling out a standard, generic employment agreement and changing the names will not do in this situation. After meeting with the client and family, the next step in the process involves obtaining a personal-care plan. A personal care plan can be initiated by a telephone conference involving the client, the family, and the affected loved one’s personal physician. A personal-care plan is the foundation upon which the personal-care agreement is built. In addition, it provides written evidence of the health condition that necessitates and justifies in-home personal care. This is vitally important when defending payments being made between family members. For people with Alzheimer’s, the care plan recommendation will state that the caregiver is needed for health care, hygiene, welfare monitoring, nutritional management, and assistance with various activities of daily life. The recommendation will typically end with the statement that “without this care, the patient would require care in a nursing facility.” Most family members are not licensed health-care professionals. A licensed health-care professional, such as a medical doctor, physician’s assistant, or other qualified individual, needs to be in charge of the case management and serve in an oversight capacity. An alternative method of creating a care plan is to hire a licensed geriatric care manager to go to the person’s house and do an assessment of the person’s needs. The geriatric care manager is trained to do a survey of the physical environment within the home and an inventory of all resources available to the individual. After completing the assessment of the individual, the environment, and the resources, a personalized care plan is created. With the assessment in hand, the lawyer will be able to draft a customized personal-care agreement. The agreement is tailored around what the care manager has identified as necessary care and other circumstances. If your loved one has memory problems and you’re afraid of the consequences that may bring, give our office a call today at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now. Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney for the past 8 years in a row by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By Rick Law of the Estate Planning Center at Law Elder Law.  Rick Law and daughter attorney Diana Law are the lead attorneys at the multi-generational law firm of Law Elder Law. Serving seniors and their families through elder law services, estate planning, guardianship, probate, wills and trusts, and much more in Kane, Kendall, DuPage, Will and Cook counties in Illinois. A client walks into a lawyer’s office and says, “I have been going over and taking care of my elderly mother for the past few months for a few hours a day. Now she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and this is going to take up a lot more of my time and energy. I may need for her to move in with me and my husband, and I am going to need to start charging her. I want to set up a personal-care agreement for her.” In this situation it is not too late to create a valid personal-care agreement even though care has already been provided for free, because at this point the client is saying that the care needs have intensified and it’s time for them to start being paid. The key for Medicaid eligibility is that someone can never be compensated for care that was being provided gratuitously. In the Medicaid context, care provided without a properly drafted and medically justified personal-care agreement is presumptively gratuitous. For example, the parents lived with their son for two years and he did many things for them gratuitously, and then suddenly he says he wants to receive payment. He says that not only does he want to receive payment going forward, he wants to be compensated for all that previous care. That will be a big issue for Medicaid eligibility for the affected loved one, because a retroactive payment will be viewed as a gift and could create a substantial period of ineligibility for the person needing Medicaid. The reality is that a lot of times people incrementally get into these situations. So if you the individual seek out lawyers early in that process, your lawyer would probably want to have them set up a low-level personal-care agreement. As the care increases, so would the amount that caregivers are being paid proportionally to the amount of hours they’re working over time. An elder law attorney will have ancillary documentation in place to validate the changes of care level needed. If your loved one has memory problems and you’re afraid of the consequences that may bring, give our office a call today at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now. Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick was named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By elder care attorney Rick Law, founder and managing partner at the multi-generational law firm of Law Elder Law.  Home of the Estate Planning Center at Law Elder Law, senior advocates in Western Chicagoland in Illinois. In a perfect world, you (the client) will approach your elder law attorney before providing any care for your elderly parent who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and give the lawyer the opportunity to create a personal-care contract for them. Unfortunately, it is much more typical that people will wait and tell their lawyers that they have been caring for their mother for the last several months free of charge, and now their mother’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse and they need to spend more time caring for her. Perhaps they need to cut back their hours at work. Whatever their situation, they have now realized that they need to have their mother pay them for the care. While it is much easier to draft the personal-care agreement prior to the start of the care, your lawyer can still draft the agreement after care has started. The key is to demonstrate an increase or escalation in the care needs of the senior. However, the personal-care agreement can only be for services to be given commencing from the date of that agreement. It could be considered fraud by the state Medicaid department to create a personal-care agreement for services that had originally been rendered gratuitously. A personal-care agreement cannot be predated. It can be very difficult for the caregivers if they first performed services for free and later request payment. In these situations a written agreement is almost certainly required. A properly drafted personal-care agreement is required as the foundational document to rebut accusations of elder abuse within the familial-care arrangement. Proper and timely bookkeeping is also required—and unfortunately is the Achilles’ heel of many of these contracts. It is very common that the parents may need a higher level of care than their child can provide. When one or both of them go to a nursing home and then apply for Medicaid, the parents account will be scrutinized and audited by the state. If there was no personal-care contract in place between the parents and the child clearly describing the care to be provided and the compensation to be paid, many states will consider the transfers as non-allowable which may in turn create a penalty period of ineligibility for nursing home Medicaid benefits for the affected loved one. This is why it’s so critical to seek the counsel of a qualified elder law attorney before taking action.  Your lawyer can provide appropriate written advice and counsel, so as to avoid being liable for creating a personal-care agreement relationship that led to a denial of nursing home Medicaid benefits. If your loved one has memory problems and you’re afraid of the consequences that may bring, give our office a call today at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now. Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney for the past 8 years in a row by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By elder lawyer Rick Law, founder of the multi-generation law firm of the Estate Planning Center at Law Elder Law in Western Chicagoland in Illinois. Serving seniors and their families in Kane, Kendall, Will. DuPage, Cook and other Illinois counties. Many states have passed legislation that has greatly expanded the definition of elder abuse… Family members who take on the role of caregiver may find themselves within the definition of people who have heightened duties relative to their loved one. Neglect of those duties can lead to both civil and criminal liability. Illinois passed an anti-elder abuse power of attorney law that went into effect July 1, 2012, which creates a presumption that if people who are agents are writing checks to themselves, that is per se abuse of the principal, the parent. This presumption can be rebutted with the existence of a written agreement that stipulates clear terms and conditions that justify payments from the principal to the agent. A properly drafted personal-care agreement is required as the foundational document to rebut accusations of elder abuse within the familial-care arrangement. Proper and timely bookkeeping is also required—and unfortunately is the Achilles’ heel of many of these contracts. Eventually the parents may need a higher level of care than their child can provide. When one or both of them go to a nursing home and then apply for Medicaid, all those checks written by the child on the parents’ account will be scrutinized and audited by the state. If there was no personal-care contract in place between the parents and the child clearly describing the care to be provided and the compensation to be paid, many states will consider the transfers as non-allowable. A nonallowable transfer will create a penalty period of ineligibility for nursing home Medicaid benefits for the affected loved one. Your elder lawyer can provide appropriate written advice and counsel to the client so as to avoid being liable for creating a personal-care agreement relationship that led to a denial of nursing home Medicaid benefits. For example, the current Code of Illinois Rules state that care provided to a senior by a friend or family member is presumed to be “gratuitous.” The rules further state that “transfers for love and affection are not considered transfers for fair market value and thus are nonallowable and subject to penalty periods.” This can make it difficult in cases where a family member has been caring for a senior and not charging for the care or not keeping adequate records. If your loved one has memory problems and you’re afraid of the consequences that may bring, give our office a call today at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now. Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney for the past 8 years in a row by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0

By Rick Law of the multi-generation law firm of Law Elder Law.  Rick Law and his daughter Diana Law are Elder Law Estate Planning attorneys and senior advocates serving seniors, boomers, and their families in Aurora, Illinois just off of the I-88 tollway. Situations in which adult children provide care for their elderly parents often start out as very casual arrangements. Many times, the first stage involves the adult children picking up some groceries for the parents while doing their own shopping or driving the parents to an appointment. Maybe they start giving their parents some money, or maybe they are coming over and cooking and cleaning and checking in on their elderly parents. Then, all of a sudden, a parent is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the adult child has to quit his or her job or cut back hours because taking care of the parent has become a full-time job. Most adult children don’t think that they need to have a lawyer draft a personal care contract, but that is exactly what needs to happen if they are providing care for their parents. The elderly parent may well be writing checks to the caregiver child for gas, food, and time spent cleaning and doing laundry. However, in all likelihood, everything is getting commingled and no one is keeping records. The child is buying the parent’s groceries and his or her own groceries and both are paying some. If these individuals are not keeping adequate records, they run the risk of the caregiver being accused of elder abuse and the senior receiving the care being ineligible for Medicaid benefits. Sometimes the child will move in with the parents to better care for them, and sometimes it is easier to have the parents move into the child’s home. Often in these situations the child is appointed the power of attorney for property or at least the power of attorney for health care for the parent. In many cases the parents add that child to their bank accounts so the child can pay bills for them, including reimbursements to the child. If your loved one has memory problems and you’re afraid of the consequences that may bring, give our office a call today at 800-310-3100.  Your first consultation is absolutely free.  We’ll let you know what steps you need to take, right now, to protect yourself and your family.  Call now. Sincerely, Rick L. Law, Attorney, Estate Planner for Retirees. Rick has been named the #1 Illinois elder law estate planning attorney from 2008-2016 by Leading Lawyer Magazine. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, AARP Magazine, TheStreet.com, and numerous newspapers and articles. Rick is the lead attorney for Law Elder Law, LLP, focusing in Estate Planning, Guardianship, and Nursing Home Solutions. His goal is to give retirees an informed edge when it comes to dealing with an uncertain future.  Get flexible retirement strategies that work during good times and bad, plus information on how you can save your home and assets from being used to pay for long term care.  Call 800-310-3100 for your free consultation now!
0