Having a child with special needs is challenging, but nearly all parents overcome the hurdles they may face. Love combined with the fierce urge to protect our children gives us superpowers that we never knew existed.
Protecting a child with special needs is hard enough when you are alive and healthy. How can you continue this protection if you become incapacitated or die? Proper estate planning is a powerful way to continue your protection after you have left this world. A tool that we often recommend during such planning is a special needs trust.
Some of the advantages of adding a special needs trust to your estate plan include the following:
- Using a trust rather than leaving your assets in a will ensures that your special needs child (or adult) will qualify for government benefit programs.
- A special needs trust ensures that your child will emerge from estate administration and probate with the means to support his or her lifestyle and care needs.
- This tool allows you to designate any funds your child may receive in a future inheritance or a successful lawsuit into the trust to keep it safe.
- A special needs trust helps you address issues specific to your loved one, even if you are unconcerned about government programs.
In our practice, we have made it one of our top goals to families with special needs children – both minors and adults — as much as possible.
We urge you to continue learning by exploring more of our estate administration, probate and planning pages. Our attorneys also invite you to contact us to discuss any specific concerns you may have.
