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If you’ve got a child with disabilities, handling their unique daily needs is essential for their well-being. And nobody knows your child’s needs better than you, the parent. This makes Disability and Special Needs Planning an extremely important safeguard to ensure that your children will be cared for properly if you become incapacitated.

This type of planning involves SSI, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Assistance, and other benefits.

Special Needs Trusts

A trust is a document that enables a trustee to manage one or more of your assets for the benefit of someone else. A special needs trust essentially allows the assets that are to be inherited by a disabled person to be managed by a professional. This will ensure that your children continue to need the financial eligibility criteria needed to receive disability benefits or supplemental security income.

Creating an ABLE Account

ABLE accounts allow families to save up money for their children without affecting their eligibility for benefits programs. The contributions made to this account are tax-free provided that all the money in the account is used for disability expenses like rent, food, transportation, employment training, education, etc.

Who is Eligible for Disability Planning?

Disability planning has two components, SSI and Medicaid, which require that the disabled individual be under a certain level of assets. This level includes all the assets that are other than a personal residence, one vehicle, and items that are needed for daily activities. Checking and savings accounts are also considered countable assets.

In other words, if you have a certain number and type of assets, they will be used primarily and only if these run out or are insufficient, then Medicaid or SSI will become the payer. However, the primary purpose of Disability Planning is still to give a disabled person the advantage of some or all of your assets, while preserving the benefits that they are eligible for.

Disability Planning ensures that the inheritance goes to a beneficiary trust or ABLE account instead of them gaining access to it directly. While this means that the beneficiary does not gain direct access to the assets, they are being held by a trustee in their benefit.

Who is Special Needs and Disability Planning not Good for?

Generally speaking, families with substantial assets and liquidity, or a high net worth who would be able to fund the treatment of the disabled individual will not find this type of planning useful.

This is mainly because Disability Planning does not give the individual direct access to an inheritance, which can be less than ideal when this involves high-value assets. 

In these particular situations, losing the government benefits might be preferable to having the inheritance out of the reach of the disabled individual. Other types of trusts may be more useful at this point.We’re looking to help you with Special needs and Disability Planning throughout the State of Missouri. Book a call with us NOW!