The Problem: 

Long term care is expensive. In Wisconsin, typical nursing home costs are $8,684 a month and assisted living costs are typically $4,400 a month in 2020 according to Genworth. Proper planning will usually pay for itself within months.

In America, people are typically required to pay for their own long term care. It’s not covered by Medicare nor is it covered by health insurance. There is a program, Title 19 of Medicaid, that will pay for your long term care, but only if you have essentially nothing left. We say essentially because, like most laws, it has its own exceptions and loopholes. Medicaid planning is about exercising your rights under the law to use those exceptions and loopholes to protect what you have and hopefully leave something for the next generation if you’d like.

The Solution:

Medicaid planning saves money. Medicaid planning lets you protect what you’ve spent your lifetime to accumulate. By using what we call ‘tools in the toolbox’ (you’ll hear that from us a lot), we are usually able to protect some, and sometimes all, of your assets from being consumed by long-term care expenses.

Planning is almost always worth it, usually pays for itself within two months of nursing home care, and proves its value time and again.

How much can you protect? Until we’ve worked together long enough, when we’ve had the chance to intimately explore your finances, your family, your care needs, and research applicable options, it’s always too difficult to say how much you can save. But we confidently say that we’re almost always able to protect something, know pretty quickly if we don’t think we can protect anything, and rarely can protect everything. We’ll let you know before charging a fee if we think there’s nothing we can protect. Finally, we guarantee our flat rate Medicaid planning, so you don’t ever have to question whether it’s worth hiring an attorney.

Our Guarantee: Your planning will pay for itself. If we can’t protect at least as much as our fee, we’ll reduce our fee to match what we were able to protect. Some conditions apply, but, mostly, the guarantee only applies to our flat fee option and you can’t have already started any other form of Medicaid planning.

How much does it cost? Less than not planning; it usually pays for itself within the first two months of nursing home care. Planning typically starts around the cost of a month in a nursing home and is usually less than two nursing home months. The skill and time required for effective planning is considerable and Cornerstone is right for the job, given its experience, reputation, and service.

The Details:

The Tools. The tools in the toolbox are numbered in the dozens and vary in their nature and the amount they can protect. Each tool correlates to a certain rule or exception in the federal or state law or the local administrative rules. For example, a parent can give their house to an adult, disabled child. It’s a specific circumstance - not every family has an adult disabled child - but it’s a powerful tool when it applies because it can transfer so much value. We might pair this exception with the general rule that you can spend your money on yourself. For example, you have too much savings to qualify for Medicaid, so, before you transfer your house to your adult disabled child - while it’s still yours - we replace the windows and the roof, pay off the mortgage, all of which are allowed, and then transfer the improved, lien free house, maximizing the amount we can protect.

The Process. The process is explained in detail on this page and typically takes a week to a few months if there are no delays outside of our control (such delays include delays from the state agency or from you, the client). We’ll meet several times throughout the process and will sometimes give you, the client, homework.

Estate Recovery. There are typically two hurdles while qualifying for Medicaid: what you have today, for yourself, and want you want to leave your family as an inheritance. The gifts you leave to your family can be affected by Wisconsin’s estate recovery program, when they take another swing at your protected assets to repay themselves for your care. Good planning considers both of these hurdles and capitalizes on your personal goals, sometimes sacrificing effectiveness in one to maximize effectiveness in the other.