What Documents Are Required to Set Up Your Estate Wishes
My question involves estate proceedings in the state of: Indiana
We are starting to do some personal documents to cover each other upon death or nursing home care. We have a Will, Living Will, General POA, and Health Care POA but need to update them to reflect life as it is now. Would we do better with a Trust? We have no large retirement assets at this time and just enough life insurance to bury us (if we are lucky). We own a marital residence and I own a separate lake cottage. We each have certain items we do want to leave to specific people upon the death of both of us. Do we each need to specific this in our wills, such as 'on the death of both myself and my spouse, I want xxx to go to xxx' or specific it some other way? Or just in one will? He has a son but I have no children and we have no children together. Our (step)son has borrowed a large amount of money from us over the years and has not and will not repay us even though he signed an IOU. For the sake of family relations, we have not pursued it but do want it reflected in our wills that he will not receive anything more from us. We also have grandchildren and nephews that we want a portion given to. Does this need to be specified in both of our Wills or Trusts? We want a bank trust department to administer our estate. Do we need to notify them that we are specifying this?
Asset protection: How do we protect assets if one of us has to go into a nursing home? We were told that we would have 100 days from the time a person was placed in a nursing home to do a Trust or something of that sort to do so before a person could be placed on Medicare. True? How much or what can be protected? If one of us has a pension and we go into a nursing home, what happens to that?
Someone told us that we needed something called a Personal Spending Agreement or some such thing. It was so that if I were in a nursing home and my husband paid a bill for me or gave me a $100 I would be legally responsible to pay him back. Des anyone know of something like this?
Thanks.
Re: What Documents Are Reguired to Set Up Your Wishes
Wishes for what?
In general you'd want:
A will
A advance medical directive (living will)
Possibly durable and medical powers of attorney.
You'd also need to look at if a trust would be useful to you as well as how your property is titled and who is the beneficiary of your various insurance and other accounts.
In short, a good estate planning attorney is probably a good ideal.
Re: What Documents Are Reguired to Set Up Your Wishes
Someone told us that we needed something called a Personal Spending Agreement or some such thing. It was so that if I were in a nursing home and my husband paid a bill for me or gave me a $100 I would be legally responsible to pay him back. Des anyone know of something like this?
Re: What Documents Are Reguired to Set Up Your Wishes
You can agree to whatever you like, between yourselves, but there's no way that your husband is going to be able to use such an agreement to divert your share of the marital estate or your separate assets away from creditors seeking payment for your necessary medical and nursing home care. Is that what he would be trying to do?
Re: What Documents Are Reguired to Set Up Your Wishes
Quote:
Quoting
inmom
Someone told us that we needed something called a Personal Spending Agreement or some such thing. It was so that if I were in a nursing home and my husband paid a bill for me or gave me a $100 I would be legally responsible to pay him back. Des anyone know of something like this?
Was that someone an attorney?
You are suffering from so much misinformation that you really do need to spend some money on an estate planning lawyer.
Re: What Documents Are Reguired to Set Up Your Wishes
Yes, an estate planning attorney had my sister sign one for her husband. He is trying to put her into a nursing home and keep all his money and cars. He told us we needed to do the same thing.
Yes.