Protect your hard-earned assets from growing nursing home costs.

The cost of a nursing home can be $7,000 to $9,000 per month or more. In order for a single person to qualify for Mississippi Medicaid nursing home assistance, you would have to spend your assets down below $4,000. Good planning may be able to help you protect a substantial amount of your assets (i.e., 50% to 60%, or even more). For example, in the case of a married couple, they are not required to spend one-half of their assets on nursing home costs before the nursing home spouse can qualify for benefits. In some cases, we can even help protect all of your assets without the need to spend them down. It just depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Protect your most important asset — your family home — from the State.

Many people think that if they receive Mississippi Medicaid for the nursing home, they will have to sell their house. Generally the house is exempt, and, as long as one or both spouses are alive, the property will not need to be sold. Additionally, after the person has been on Mississippi Medicaid and has passed away, the state will in most cases come back and try to recover money spent on their behalf. Oftentimes, through proper planning this “estate recovery” can be minimized or avoided.



Keep your plan up to date.

Estate plans change when a nursing home enters the equation. Most of our clients who are married have all of their assets in the name of both spouses. If one spouse then goes into a nursing home, what happens if the “healthy spouse” at home passes away first? In that case, under the typical estate plan, all of the assets would go to the nursing home spouse, and then would have to be spent down to $4,000. Instead, however, we are often able to redo the estate planning so that if the healthy spouse passes away first, assets can be put into a special type of trust for the benefit of the nursing home spouse, thus being protected from the high costs of care, and then perhaps passed on down to the kids as an inheritance.