Letters of Direction for Disabled Children

In this Elder Law Minute, Kaye Dent explains why it’s important to recognize that you may be the only one who understands the needs of your disabled loved one, so it’s crucial to have a plan in place to pass onto another caretaker.
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"Your Trusted Advisor on the Elder Care Journey"
Dent Coulson Elder Law is dedicated to providing families in the St. Louis area with their Elder Law needs. Our practice areas include Asset Preservation Planning, Veterans Benefits, Medicaid Eligibility, Alzheimer's Planning, Special Needs Planning, Estate Planning and more. We understand the financial challenges you may face as you and your loved ones grow older.
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Video Transcript:
Hi, I'm Kaye DeSelms Dent with Dent Coulson Elder Law, here with an elder law minute for you. These videos are intended to educate you about the Elder Care Journey, which begins earlier in life than you might think. We hope that you find them useful, and if you have further questions, please call us at Dent Coulson Elder Law.
Here at Dent Coulson Elder Law, we do a good bit of special needs planning for people who have disabled children, primarily sometimes grandchildren that they want to make special provisions for. It's important to consider these situations in your estate plan because if you leave money directly to a disabled person, you might be putting their government benefits such as Medicaid and SSI at risk.
Also, who's going to handle the money for them if they're not able to? Your disabled loved one might be perfectly capable of handling their own funds, but they might not be. Aside from worrying about funds or other assets that you might be leaving for their benefit, what about their ongoing care, especially for your disabled loved ones who can't speak for themselves?
A letter of direction is basically a set of instructions and guidelines that you can leave for future caregivers for when you're gone. This might be to your other children, to physicians, to nursing facilities, other residential facilities. It can be an all-purpose, very comprehensive, quite frankly, very lengthy letter, and we do have a format that we can assist you with to make sure that you cover all the bases.
In particular, you'll want to make certain that for a disabled loved one who can't speak up for him or herself, you're making it known what their likes and dislikes are, what's special about them. In one instance, I had a client whose son was largely non-verbal, and you wouldn't have thought that he would enjoy reading. You wouldn't know that unless you knew him, but he was able to read and enjoyed it very much. So her letter of direction and her estate plan made clear that he was to be provided with reading materials. There are things like that that, as a parent or a grandparent or another close loved one, only you may know or a limited number of people may know, and the outside unrelated caregivers cannot ever be expected to know.
So as part of your special needs planning for your special needs loved one, we here at Dent Coulson Elder Law can guide you through the letter of direction process and help you communicate properly to those future caregivers so that your loved one receives the best care possible throughout his or her lifetime. Please give us a call at Dent Coulson Elder Law to set up your consultation today. Thank you.