This week, I met with a client to discuss a Louisiana Medicaid Trust to protect the family’s assets from long term care costs. These Medicaid trusts must always be termed as irrevocable trusts. When a trust is irrevocable, you give up the right to reach into the trust and remove assets from the trust directly back into your name. So the question becomes, how will you get assets out of an irrevocable trust if you ever need access to those funds to pay for major expenses that may arise.Removing assets from your Louisiana Irrevocable Trust is easy to do. To [...]

Yesterday, I met with couple facing a difficult situation. The husband, in his 50’s, was recently diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. This harsh news forced the family to evaluate their plans for the future. With such an early diagnosis, both spouses fear that as the husband’s condition worsens, he could be forced to enter a long term care facility for a period that could easily extend 5 to 10 years or more. Under such a scenario, the family would be forced to spend down the majority of their assets on the nursing home before the husband could qualify for aid [...]

Last week I met with a couple in the Houma office to discuss setting up a living trust. The family was interested in a Trust that would allow them to avoid probate at death and allow them to spread out and delay any inheritance that would go to two of their daughters who they deemed as irresponsible.Typically when families set up a living trust, the trust terminates after both spouses have passed and the funds in the trust are distributed to the heirs immediately upon the death of both spouses. This family wanted to delay the inheritance and place conditions [...]

Earlier this week I met with a family from Metairie whose elderly mother is on the verge of entering a nursing home. The kids wanted to know how mom could qualify for Medicaid to pay for her care so that the family could preserve as much wealth as possible. Their father died 4 years ago, leaving the mother usufruct over half of the property that she and the husband owned together. The kids wanted to know whether the portion Mom had usufruct over would count against her eligibility to receive Medicaid funding to pay for her nursing home care. In [...]

I am currently working on a probate for a woman who passed away about a year after setting up a Louisiana Revocable Living Trust for the purpose of avoiding probate. When going through the estate planning process, she did not realize the importance of having all of her brokerage accounts out of her name and into the trust before her death. This is because brokerage accounts are probate assets that will become frozen when you pass if they are still titled in your name.I assume life got in the way, so she never transferred the accounts into the trust. When [...]

Yesterday, I talked with a woman from New Orleans about opening succession for her husband who died 5 years ago. She received some bad advice from a friend who told her not to worry about opening succession because it would be too much trouble. Now she has come to realize that she has limited access to a brokerage account shared by her and her husband, and she cannot redirect the investment of the money which is currently earning very little. In order to unfreeze this account, succession (a.k.a. probate) must be opened.In addition, she is also nervous about the nursing [...]

There is one misconception about tax law that I hear more than any other. Clients always tell me, “I heard if I give $14,000 to my kids each year, it will reduce the amount of taxes they have to pay when I die”. This statement is only true for families with large amounts of money. In fact, that statement only applies to .04% of families in the U.S. Under the current system, only estates over roughly $5.3 million for single people and $10.6 million for married couples will have to pay any estate taxes to the federal government. For Louisiana [...]

Clients are always looking to avoid the Louisiana probate process because it is often comes with a hefty price tag. When someone dies with assets titled in his or her name, the family must hire an attorney to prepare and file a complicated set of legal pleadings with the court in order to clear title to those assets into the names of the heirs. This court process is called probate or succession. The cost for probates in Louisiana is usually at a minimum about $5,000 because of the amount of legal work and court filing fees involved.Here in Louisiana, there [...]

This morning I met with a Metairie couple where each spouse was on their second marriage. The husband had 6 children from his prior marriage while the wife had 3. We created a Louisiana Revocable Living Trust for the family to avoid the potential for a messy probate where the kids on each side would fight it out for rights in each spouse’s estate.The couple wanted the husband's side of the family to get half of the trust and the wife’s side to get half of the trust. So instead of dividing the trust equally between all nine kids on [...]

Last week I met with a client in our Metairie office to make some changes to a Revocable Living Trust that she had established in 2001. The primary goal in establishing this Louisiana Living Trust was to avoid the court-supervised probate process (also know as succession) after each spouse’s death. As you’ve heard me say time and time again, avoiding probate can save your family thousands of dollars in probate expenses, months of delay, and a great deal of stress.My client and her late husband purchased this trust from a non-attorney financial advisor. When I met the client, we discovered [...]