The financial pitfalls facing a married couple when one spouse requires nursing home care are wide, deep, and surprisingly hidden. The emotional pain of a married person’s admission of his or her spouse to a nursing home rivals the painful experience of a spouse’s death. Unfortunately, critical financial decisions rush toward the healthier spouse like […]

Nursing home bills usually turn a person’s world upside down when his or her spouse requires nursing home care (the average Indiana nursing home bed costs $7,167 per month in 2022). This article begins a two-part series about state and federal law can save a nursing home resident’s spouse from poverty, and how an experienced […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] An audience member at one of our recent presentations about advance health care directives suggested that people should make powers of attorney and advance health care directives when they reach 50 years old or older. We responded that most people over 18 years of age […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] Revocable trust plans have been around for fifty years or more. Revocable trusts were quite the rage when we began practicing law in the early 1990s. Most people wanted the privacy advantage that revocable trusts held over last wills and testaments. Some people believed mistakenly […]

The State of Indiana has published that Indiana nursing home care costs an average of more than $71,000 per year. Fortunately, federal law protects most spouses of nursing home residents from impoverishment. Here are some Indiana’s spousal impoverishment rule features: The Spousal Impoverishment Protection Law applies for nursing home admissions occurring on or after September […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] People often forget to keep their important papers in order. Disorganization can rob you of the chance to react quickly in critical or important moments. Disorganization can lead to serious errors after your death or if someone is helping you manage your business during a […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] Think for a moment about what “last will and testament” means to you. Maybe the term reminds you of a movie with a widow dressed in black, perhaps wearing a black veil. You may think about a deceased person’s family gathered at a lawyer’s office […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] New clients often ask us to prepare wills and we prepare wills for most of our estate planning clients. We tell clients that wills are important to deal with the business of dying, but death is not usually the biggest issue. A debilitating stroke or […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] Economic and sociological factors have transformed the way we care for elderly family members over the past sixty years. We celebrate economic and social progress, but many caregivers pay heavy costs for that progress. Most of us have living parents or grandparents that have survived […]

[See our Disclaimers page about relying on this website’s contents.] When someone disagrees with you, the disagreement threatens to deprive you of something you that want or load a burden upon you that you do not want. Disagreements end in various ways, including physical violence, smoldering grudges, court orders, arbitration decisions, and negotiated settlements, but […]