Home Care

Home-based care allows individuals to stay at their home—or that of a loved one—and live as independently as possible. Home-based care primarily involves personal care, such as help taking medication, bathing, and daily activities. For the most part, family members, spouses, friends, and neighbors provide this care.

However, these services can also be provided by paid caregivers like healthcare professionals on a part-time basis. The primary goal of home-based care is to ensure people can remain safe, while still giving them the independence of living in a familiar environment. When it no longer is safe for someone to remain at home, seniors will often explore other long-term care options.

Assisted Living

Assisted living is a housing facility for individuals who no longer wish to live on their own but do not require around-the-clock medical care. For the most part, people in assisted living facilities are healthy and only require minor medical assistance and supervision. However, assisted living facilities will have health care and personal services—such as bathing or chronic illness treatment—available for those residents who need it.

Additionally, seniors in these facilities often have more independent living areas, such as separate apartments with shared kitchens and living rooms. Assisted living facilities are well known for their recreational activities, so seniors can interact and be part of a social community.

Nursing Home

For those seniors who require more intense medical care—especially if they have a severe health issue—a nursing home might be the right option. Staff in nursing homes provide constant care for their residents and have greater access to rehabilitative and healthcare services. Nursing home residents often need more intensive supervision and healthcare treatment, including physical therapy, using the restroom, and dressing. Because of the extensive care required, the average cost of staying at a nursing home is approximately twice that of an assisted living facility. While many nursing homes have common spaces for residents to interact, there is less of a focus on recreational activities and the sense of community.

Because the best long-term care solution depends on an individual’s particular circumstances—including their health, savings, and age—individuals thinking ahead for their long-term care should contact an experienced estate planning attorney in their area.

Contact a Colorado Estate Planning Attorney

If you or a loved one is curious about the long-term care options available to them, contact the Colorado estate planning attorneys at the Braverman Law Group. With years of experience creating estate plans and advising families on how to plan ahead for long-term housing and care options, our attorneys will take the time to ensure your needs are met. Planning ahead for the future can be stressful, but by speaking with us, we will take the time to explain your options and answer any questions you may have. To schedule a free consultation, call us today at 303-800-1588.

After failing to pass in the Colorado legislature, the End-of-Life Options Act was placed on the Colorado ballot in 2016. This initiative passed and led to the bill’s enactment, which allows terminally ill people to request assistance in dying—but in only certain defined situations. To request a prescription for life-ending medication in Colorado, a patient must be: at least 18 years old; a Colorado resident; mentally capable of making and communicating health care decisions; diagnosed with a terminal disease in which they will die over the next six months. Beyond these requirements, the patient will only be prescribed the medicine if they make three requests—two verbal and one written— for the medicine at least fifteen days apart in front of two qualified, adult witnesses. The doctor must also offer the patient the opportunity to withdraw the request for the medication before providing the prescription.

For individuals with a terminal illness, it is critical to have an estate plan in place before they pass away. This is because an estate plan explains how individuals want to be cared for in their final days and what measures should be taken—this can include taking actions legalized under The End-of-Life Options Act, if the individual has a terminal illness. Otherwise, it provides instructions on the medical interventions they want to be taken, and who should make decisions on the individual’s behalf if they become incapacitated. Additionally, creating an estate plan provides for how, and to whom, they want their assets to be distributed. If a person does not have an estate plan before they die, the court will decide how their assets will be handled. While creating an estate plan—and specifically making end-of-life decisions—may be uncomfortable, it alleviates a major source of stress in the end.

Because The End-of-Life Actions Act—and the thought of dying generally—is an emotionally fraught topic, individuals should contact an experienced estate planning attorney to ensure their wishes are followed after their passing.

Contact a Boulder Estate Planning Attorney

If you or a loved one has not thought about end-of-life treatment or creating an estate plan, contact the experienced attorneys at the Braverman Law Group, LLC. Having a strong Colorado estate plan in place is an essential step to guarantee a person’s family is taken care of after their passing. Our attorneys have the knowledge and experience to draft a detailed estate plan for you, and can discuss whether you may benefit from wills, trusts, guardianship planning, and many other critical estate planning tools. To speak with one of our attorneys today, give us a call at 303-800-1588.

What is the Full Retirement Age for Social Security Benefits?

The full retirement age – where seniors are entitled to start receiving their full monthly benefit – depends on an individual’s year of birth. For those born between 1943 to 1954, the full retirement age is 66 years old. For individuals born between 1955 to 1959, the full retirement age is between 66 years and 2 months to 66 years and 10 months (increasing by two months each year). For everyone born in 1960 or later, the full retirement age is 67 years old. It is also important to note that people can file for Social Security benefits as early as 62; however, they are not eligible to receive their entire monthly stipend until they reach the full retirement age.

Am I Eligible to Delay My Social Security Benefits, and What Will Delaying Them Do?

It is a common misconception that seniors must file for Social Security benefits once they reach full retirement age. Rather, seniors have the option to delay their filing, which means they are electing to not receive benefits until a later age, with the knowledge that their benefits will then be more per month. Delaying can grow a person’s benefits up to 8% per year until the age of 70. For instance, if a senior is entitled to $1,500 per month at the full retirement age of 67, they can increase their monthly benefits by $360 if they wait until age 70 to file.

Why Do People Choose to Delay Their Benefits?

Because seniors often rely on Social Security benefits to meet their daily needs after retirement, many wonder why others decide to delay. This is an extremely personal decision, but people often decide to delay when they are still collecting a paycheck or expect to live a long life. When Social Security is a person’s only form of income, they do not need to pay taxes on the amount; however, when a senior is receiving a paycheck from another source, this will often put them over the income limit and require them to pay taxes on their Social Security. Thus, many individuals still working at the full retirement age will delay filing for Social Security until the benefits would be their sole source of income – thus allowing them to avoid paying taxes.

Deciding when to file for Social Security benefits depends on each person’s situation and needs; because of this, those worried about whether they are filing at the correct time should contact an attorney experienced in both estate planning and elder law matters to help.

Are You or an Aging Loved One Interested in Learning More about Social Security Benefits?

If you or an aging loved one wants to learn more about whether delaying Social Security filing is right for you or them, contact the Colorado estate planning attorneys at Braverman Law Group. Our experienced attorneys have decades of experience handling all varieties of estate planning and elder law issues, and we can evaluate your situation with care and ease. To discuss your situation with an attorney today, call our office at 303-800-1588.

In fact, a Power of Attorney is both more powerful and less powerful than we need. Basic Powers of Attorney often do not include the provisions we need to plan for nursing home care. If the Power of Attorney does not specifically authorize an action – like picking up mail or signing required form Powers of Attorney at banks and investment companies – then that action is not authorized.

Thief Daughter

This can become a real problem at banks because they often refuse to honor Powers of Attorney that are older than six months or that are not on their proprietary forms. If the Power of Attorney authorizes the Agent to sign a bank’s Power of Attorney form, that may resolve the issue. Few Powers of Attorney authorize the actions necessary to plan for nursing home care benefits.

At the same time, the Power of Attorney can be too powerful. If we are incapacitated and cannot supervise our Agent, who does? The answer is no one. The District Attorney can get involved in cases where the Agent is misusing the Power of Attorney for their own benefit but someone has to call the D.A. to tell them what’s going on.

If you are aware that a Power of Attorney or an elder’s or disabled person’s finances are being abused in Boulder County, call Adult Protective Services at 720-564-2283 right away. If you are outside of Boulder County, call your police department’s non-emergency number or your District Attorney’s office.

We had a recent case where a daughter had abused a Power of Attorney, using her dad’s checking account debit card as if it were her own for salons and pet toys. The other daughter did not find out about this abuse until after the father died. We are helping our client to take those fraudulent expenses out of what the abusive daughter inherits. But if the father had lived a few more years, the abusive daughter could have spent everything leaving their father impoverished.

One way to protect yourself from abuse is to be extremely careful in who you name to be your Agents. We attorneys see children financially abuse their parents all of the time so don’t just assume your child will take good care of you. If you have seen your child act responsibly with substantial sums of money and compassionately towards you, then consider naming them as your Agent. If your child is addicted to credit cards or carries animosity towards you, consider someone else.

A powerful way to protect yourself from abuse is to create a revocable living trust. The structure of the trust requires your successor trustee (the person in charge if you become incapacitated) to send financial reports to your beneficiaries. That will shine some daylight on what your successor trustee is doing and invite the people you care about the most to examine what your successor trustee is doing with your money. With most of your assets managed by your trust, your Agent has much less control over your future.

Finally, make sure your trust and Power of Attorney authorize the making of gifts if nursing home care is in your near-term future. That will allow the people you trust to get you qualified for Medicaid in appropriate situation

There are so many easy ways to screw up your estate plan – which can damage family relationships for life in many cases – and so few ways to make sure it’s right. I’ll share how our clients get peace of mind that their plan’s going to provide what they need and bring their family closer, not the opposite.

Not Having a Plan

In a sense, everyone does have an estate plan: state law makes this point a certainty. It simply may not be the plan that you had in mind, or that your family would have preferred.

Every state has laws of “intestacy.” Intestacy is the word for dying without a will. The laws of intestacy don’t control assets that have beneficiary designations (unless those beneficiaries have also died) so this “plan without a plan” can result in very unfair and unequal divisions of assets.

One major pitfall to be aware of in Colorado’s laws of intestacy is the treatment of the surviving spouse. Your surviving spouse will NOT inherit everything you have built together. The half that is deemed to be yours will be divided between your spouse and your next of kin.

Watch out, because this will affect you too if your spouse is the one who dies first. You don’t want to have to sell your home to pay out to your spouses’s next of kin!

Another major downside to not having a plan is that you have no provisions for how to care for you if you become incapacitated. In Colorado, that means two important things: one, your loved ones are going to have to spend a bunch of money and time begging a judge for permission to care for you and two, you are going to be kept alive, even as a hopeless vegetable with no quality of life for as long as technologically possible (and that can be a long time!).

How Forbes Got It Wrong: “It simply may not be the plan that you had in mind, or that your family would have preferred.”

I guarantee that it will not be the plan you had in mind, or that your family would have preferred. Let me list just a short sampling of the things people discover about failure-to-plan plans that they usually do not like:

~80% of people become incapacitated during their lives for some period of time.

Court Hearing

If you have no plan, all of your financials and medical information becomes part of the court (i.e. public) record so that someone (not of your choosing) can get the court’s approval to make medical and personal decisions for you (and get paid for it out of your money).

~Likewise, when you die, every single thing you own is itemized for the public record along with who is getting it, how old they are and where they live. It makes for very convenient sales target list-making for the honorable and just target list-making for the dishonorable con men and women who are known to work the probate lists.

~The amount that you can pass on free of estate tax has changed every year since 2001.

Forty percent

Yes, we have a $5M exemption now. But Obama has proposed a $3.5M exemption and what’s to stop the next proposal from returning to $1M or even $600,000? (That would mean that anything you own after the first $600,000 would be taxed at the rate of (probably) 40% due within 9 months of death.)

It’s all so avoidable!

What makes the idea of getting your estate plan done so scary for you? Take just two minutes right now and come up with three obstacles to getting your estate plan done. Then come up with the three best reasons to get it done. I’ll bet if you compare the two, the obstacles are *nothing* compared to the reasons to do it.

You know that Bennett Braverman and I are experienced in all sorts of fascinating family and asset arrangements and we can probably help you with yours too.

Best Regards, Diedre Braverman

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AgingParents.com did an article listing “5 Things You Need To Do After A Holiday Visit With Aging Parents.” Depending upon how prepared your parents are, you could go through these five keys in five minutes or, at the other end of the spectrum, you may need to schedule a family meeting and another visit.

First, find out what legal planning documents your parents have. If they have not been reviewed in the last three years or if your parents don’t have any, help your folks find an estate planning attorney in their state who can help them make sure they have an effective plan in place. Because every family is unique, I won’t attempt to list every legal document they might need, but here are some of the most frequently necessary:

• Revocable living trust: this trust can ensure your parents will avoid the need for a financial Guardianship or Conservatorship in the event one of them becomes disabled. The trust can also make Probate unnecessary after a parent dies, saving the family stress, strain, delays and money.
• Will: when there is a revocable living trust in place, the will just leaves everything to the trust. If, however, your parents have opted to plan without a revocable living trust, the Will is the key document that determines who gets what. It does not provide protection against the need for a financial Guardianship or Conservatorship, and it does not avoid Probate.
• Durable Financial Power of Attorney: this document can vary from 4 pages to 30 pages long or more. Generally, the longer the document the more thorough it is. This gives someone – probably the other parent and then one of the children – the power to manage financial matters for a parent who can’t manage them for himself or herself. The choice of who will have these powers can make the difference between realistic convenience (the more people you name to act together, the harder it is to coordinate efforts) and maintenance of sibling bonds versus a logistical mess between siblings who will never speak to each other again. A good estate planning attorney will offer a family meeting to answer questions and make everyone comfortable with the order of names on the various lists.
• Healthcare Power of Attorney: also called a Healthcare Directive in some states, this document authorizes someone else (again, perhaps a family meeting makes sense) to make healthcare decisions for the person who is unable to make them for themselves.
• HIPAA Release: the Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act imposed punitive fines on any healthcare provider who releases any of a patient’s confidential information to some one else. Your parents can make an exception to those penalties for information released to authorized people. Without this document, it’s possible that if your father is admitted to the hospital, no one – including your mother – will be able to find him because hospitals will not release the information of whether or not he has been admitted.

We estate planning attorneys have piles of other documents at our disposal. We can provide the kids with lifelong asset protection. We can avoid or reduce estate taxes. We can help a parent qualify for nursing home benefits. We can get creative and ensure just about any goal your parent imagines is met – or at least encouraged and supported. But the documents above are an absolute minimum that everyone should have. Even you!

Second, you could scope out whether they have thought about how they will get help to manage at home when they need it. A lucky few have long-term-care insurance policies that cover at-home care. If your parents are in that lucky few, make sure everyone in the family has the policy information so it’s not lost when it’s needed. If they don’t, then a sit-down about finances and the cost of at-home help is the only way you can be sure your parents won’t have to move into a nursing home as soon as things get a little tricky for them.

Third, have the conversation with your parents about alternative living arrangements. There are many lovely facilities that provide light assistance (cooking, cleaning) for those who need only that and that offer a nursing home on the same property for people who need more care.

Fourth, consider whether your parents would benefit from assistance with paying bills and managing finances. If they would, work out a solid plan with your siblings and approach your parents with a united offer of help.

Fifth, find out what to do if a health emergency arises. Where do they keep their Healthcare Power of Attorney and HIPAA Releases? Should you keep a copy? (Probably – but make sure it stays up to date.) Where do they keep their medicines? Create a list of their doctors, each one’s specialty and their phone numbers.

“Holidays can be so busy, it may be easier to just overlook any danger signs you see with aging parents. Here’s hoping you won’t overlook anything. Take a deep breath, prepare yourself to face these responsibilities and lead the way. As your parents continue to age, you will feel much greater confidence when you are prepared. And as I tell my husband, the work of being prepared good modeling for our own kids. I want them to have it easy and know just what to do when it’s our turn to be the aging and maybe frail parents. According to our 20-something kids, we’re already the aging parents!”

The list may seem daunting but with the assistance of any siblings and an estate planning or elder law attorney, you can broach these delicate topics from an educated and caring position.

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