Put Your Accounts in Your Daughter’s Name — What Could Go Wrong?

Excerpt from: Fleming & Curti, PLC (click for full article)

 

Seniors are subjected to a constant drumbeat of advice: make sure you have no assets in your own name, or you will lose them to the nursing home. Transfer everything to your children to “protect” your assets. Is it good advice?

We usually counsel against such transfers. They are a bad idea for several reasons, but chiefly for these two reasons:

1. Such transfers are not likely to work, given the five-year look-back period for Medicaid eligibility. In other words, if you make such a transfer shortly before you go to the nursing home, you won’t be eligible for government assistance with your long-term care costs for up to five years — or even longer, in some cases.
2. Even if you successfully “protect” your assets from your own nursing home costs, you have just subjected them to the recipient’s creditors and claims.