The Cost of Long Term Care

cost of long term care

A big part of estate planning nowadays is efficiency. In the old days, it was taxes, taxes, and more taxes. Taxes are still out there, but most often folks will come in and say, “Chris, I want to make things a little easier for the next generation. I just settled the estate of my parents, you won’t believe how long it took, what the expenses were, what my brother wanted to argue over, so I wanted to make things a little smoother for my children.” So what you’ll do is one way to minimize court contact, because nothing good happens in court, is make sure your accounts are titled correctly. And what I mean by that is I’m not picking on the investments, I’m picking on how they’re titled. Do we have a beneficiary situation with those accounts? You hear POD, pay on death, TOD, transfer on death. They’re all the same thing. They’re basically forms of a beneficiary. So even if your will said, “Leave everything to Mickey Mouse,” but your beneficiaries were pay on death to the children, the beneficiary is control and they’re not subject to probate.