First... thank you all for the kind words.
After 6 years of wordy posts, my instinct was to not overstay my welcome as my retirement experience may not be as applicable in today's financial environment.
A recent article about reduced support for medicaid triggered memories of older posts wherein I had outlined planning a safety net for extreme medical expenses in the later years. The last post concerning this was here:
http://www.early-retirement.org/foru...ml#post1899979
This was preceded by two earlier posts, #146 and #150... which outlined the planning for handling potential long term care costs.. in short, where a married couple should keep ownership of the primary home, so that a long term care expense (commonly $70K to $100K for one year) would not cause the healthy person to have to spend the full amount, but that after depleting the couples assets, the partner could keep the home, and that medicaid would pay for the long term care expense... and that the state would not come after the (owned home), until that person passed away, and where the state would place a lien on the house, to pay for the medicaid expenses incurred.
Too complicated to think about now,....?right?... Hmmm... Maybe not.
My experience here in our CCRC has now seen a dozen or more cases, where
the "healthy' couple sold their home, and were forced to pay for long term care... selling down the $$$ assets from the house sale, and leaving the healthy partner with no place to live, and minimal Social Security payments, hardly enough to survive on.
Referring to the linked post, it appeared that there would be a change on State financing for Medicaid, sometime in the future. Now this is happening. and the outlook is bleak at best... per this recent situation in Maine, and Ohio, where legislation is threatening massive cutbacks in medicaid.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nat...ACL/story.html
The long and short of this problem means that a 10 year stay in a nursing facility, could cost from $600K to $1M. In the 69 units in our CCRC, more than half of the residents have been there for more than 5 years.
Here's a real-life article from the NYT that puts the problem in perspective
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/s...ing-homes.html
Medicaid pays for most of the 1.4 million people in nursing homes. It covers 20 percent of all Americans and 40 percent of poor adults.
Our admissions office is now recommending elderlaw and financial advisors be consulted to prepare separate assets trusts to reduce the risk of losing everything.
The point here is:
That the legal protection must be in place for five years before the need... because of the 5 year lookback
If you're sitting on a nest egg of millions, and don't plan to leave anything to the kids, this is probably one you can ignore, but to put a point on the subject, two of my current friends (age mid 60's) are caught in this conundrum, with wives in the nursing home, and my friends' assets being spent at a rapid rate, and with no safety net, because they had sold their homes, and were renting... all of this while Illinois is still offering medicaid.
The warning is there, as more states are teetering on the massive reductions in medicaid spending.
The above is my interpretation only... but thought it important enough to bring an update. The number of persons now living in care units is growing by quantum leaps, and government financial help for the elderly is not only not keeping up, but quickly being reduced.
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For those were wondering if I might have passed away, not so, just slower and dealing with more memory problems, but still reasonably able to get around, and spending more and more time volunteering in the community running several weekly activities... (we're taking a try at Bocce Ball next week)... wondering if my friends will be able to play using their walkers an wheel chairs...
going to give it a try...
regards,
bob
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