October is Special Needs Awareness Month! To celebrate, Annette Hines hosted a series of complimentary trainings via Zoom each Wednesday in October. Three of those trainings were also featured as Parenting Impossible Podcast episodes:
- Special Needs Planning
- Voice and Choice: Guardianship and Legal Decision-Making
- Special Needs Trust Administration
Each episode features key points related to how to protect yourself or a loved one with a disability through proper legal planning and decision-making.
Host Annette Hines notes at the beginning that most people she talks with about estate planning automatically think one of two things: 1) Either it’s something to do with taxes, or 2) it’s all about my will. Estate planning is really a navigation system or roadmap to get to a set of goals that you have established. When you are protecting someone with a disability, you want to ensure that the right people are in charge of your family at the right time, no matter who gets sick, who becomes incapacitated, or who passes away. We do all this with proper legal planning documents in place and an understanding of who are the people in your Circle of Care™ that you can count on to be there when you cannot be.
A properly executed estate plan will examine all of your property and consider all the people in your life while ensuring that all of your goals get achieved. The essential part of estate planning is to maximize your odds of getting the most of what you want, accomplishing the most goals you can, and the least of what you don’t want.
In this episode, Hines explains the essential documents and elements of special needs planning and provides particular details related to special needs trusts including the role of the trustee and working with a professional planner.
Leave us a comment and let us know what you think of this episode!