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 remove assets from an irrevocable trust, you will need to distribute the assets out of the trust to any of your named beneficiaries (your beneficiaries are the heirs who will inherit the trust after your passing). Distributing assets out of your trust to beneficiaries typically involves writing a check out of a trust bank account or investment account to that named beneficiary. Once the beneficiary receives the distribution from the trust, they will either cash the check and give you the cash, or they will deposit the funds into their own account and write a check back to you for the amount of the distribution. Under this arrangement you have not gone directly from the trust back into your name, and you have not broken the irrevocability of the trust. This means that the funds remaining in the trust will continue to be protected from Louisiana Nursing Home Spend Down.
To figure out the best way to plan your Louisiana Estate in a way that protects your assets from Nursing Home Poverty, call (504) 274-1980 in the Metairie and New Orleans Area or call (985) 246-3020 in Mandeville, Covington, Slidell, Houma, Thibodaux, and surrounding areas.