{"id":257,"date":"2010-05-17T15:08:16","date_gmt":"2010-05-17T19:08:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/connecticutelderlawblog.wordpress.com\/?p=257"},"modified":"2014-11-07T20:28:29","modified_gmt":"2014-11-08T00:28:29","slug":"consider-this-before-buying-a-financial-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/consider-this-before-buying-a-financial-product\/","title":{"rendered":"Consider this before buying financial products"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If there is a need for long-term\u00a0care you will need to access as much as $12,500.00 to cover each month of nursing home care, $5,500.00 per month for assisted living and $250.00 per day for live in home care.\u00a0\u00a0 What you don\u2019t need are additional unexpected or hidden costs when you try to get to your money.<\/p>\n<p>So what should you know in advance?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Will there be a penalty to access your money?<\/li>\n<li>If yes, what will be the total cost for <em>access<\/em>? Transaction fee? \u00a0Management fee?<\/li>\n<li>Is there an early access penalty? Some investments require you keep them for 5 years to avoid\u00a0a penalty from being\u00a0imposed.\u00a0 How does the company selling the investment defines <em>early access<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>While some investments waive the penalty if <em>you<\/em>\u00a0need long-term care during the penalty period time, what if <em>your spouse<\/em> needs nursing home care and you need the money to for their care?<\/li>\n<li>CT Medicaid\/T19 program requires you to surrender certain types of investments to become eligible.\u00a0\u00a0 If you may need this program you need to know what investments make the most sense prior to investing or if you already have those investments what the future cost will be to you.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It makes sense to consult with an experienced independent elder law attorney <em>prior to<\/em>\u00a0making these investments to make sure you understand what you need to know before\u00a0you commit to any investment.\u00a0 In addition, you need to make sure you have the appropriate legal documents\u00a0in place\u00a0that will allow others to act in your place if you are unable to so\u00a0they\u00a0can access your money to pay for you or your spouses needs.<\/p>\n<p>To give you an example I am going to tell you about a client I had several years ago.\u00a0\u00a0Before I met him\u00a0he was advised to invest the majority of his money into staggered annuities.\u00a0 Per his financial advisor the reason for doing so was\u00a0&#8220;to get\u00a0the highest rate of return on his money&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately,\u00a0my client\u00a0required long-term\u00a0care services fairly quickly after these products were purchased.\u00a0 Since he had no\u00a0accessible cash nor did he have long-term care insurance his wife had to surrender\u00a0each of the\u00a0annuities\u00a0paying a significant penalty each time for each one to pay for his care.\u00a0 What bothered me was that at the time of the initial investments it was known to the financial advisor that his client\u00a0was suffering from dementia and he would need long-term\u00a0care.\u00a0\u00a0It was also known\u00a0to him that\u00a0based on their\u00a0overall income\u00a0they\u00a0could not self finance his long-term care costs and he would ultimately need to access Title19\/Medicaid\u00a0to pay for his long-term\u00a0care services.\u00a0 The client incurred significant surrender costs and the spouse had to go through hoops to get the money from the investment company.\u00a0 Perhaps\u00a0in this case it would have been\u00a0wiser for the client to keep the money in a local bank in CD&#8217;s or a money market account for easy access and to\u00a0avoid the inevitable surrender penalties and difficulty the spouse had in accessing their money.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the client was never given this option as a choice so we will never know what he would have done had he and his family had all of the information available to them prior to investing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If there is a need for long-term\u00a0care you will need to access as much as $12,500.00 to cover each month of nursing home care, $5,500.00 per month for assisted living and $250.00 per day for live in home care.\u00a0\u00a0 What you don\u2019t need are additional unexpected or hidden costs when you try to get to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[119,137,50],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-long-term-care-insurance-2","tag-alzheimers-disease","tag-annuities","tag-title-19"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2381,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/2381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliambrown.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}