What Will Happen To Your Family Cabin If Your Loved One Requires Long-Term Care?

Are you worried about what will happen to your family cabin if your aging loved one requires Long-Term Care? It's crucial to think ahead and include your vacation property in your Long-Term Care and Estate Plan. Don't wait until it's too late to ensure that your family's cherished getaway continues to be enjoyed by future generations.

Millaine Wells
Welcome back to Local Five Live. It is cottage season, so make sure yours can stay in the family if that's what you want.

Lisa Malak
Yeah, it takes some Long-Term Planning. And here with some help, Attorney Justin Randall from Hooper Law Office. Good morning. So cottages or land, hunting land, whatever the case may be. Kind of an interesting situation because it's often owned by several members of the same family. So what happens when one of them needs Long-Term Care?

Justin Randall
So when one of them needs Long-Term Care, their portion of that cottage or property can still be subject to their Long Term Care expenses. So there's a lot of planning that needs to be done prospectively to plan for that situation so that the rest of the family isn't stuck figuring out, my gosh, what do we do in this situation?

Millaine Wells
So what are some of the options to protect that property while still making sure people have access to the Care that they need?

Justin Randall
Absolutely. There's a couple of things that people really want to do. One is actually potentially looking at setting up a business entity of some kind to own the property. This can be helpful to deal with things like disability Long-Term Care that you can put triggering provisions in that say what happens to that person's share? Do they have to be bought out if something like that happens so that it can protect the property from those sort of unforeseen circumstances?

Justin Randall
But in addition to that, somebody who's concerned about Long-Term Care is probably going to want to look at some additional prospective planning on their own side of things, possibly dealing with things like an Irrevocable Trust to even hold their share of that business entity.

Lisa Malak
All right. So what are some tips that you have to begin the discussion?

Justin Randall
Start early. As we say a lot with any sort of Estate Planning type discussion. I mean, the earlier you start, the more in-depth you can get with some of these pretty complicated questions, especially the more people you have involved. You want to give people ample time to have these discussions. It's a lot harder to get, you know, five people to agree on certain things than it is to get one or two. So starting early is probably the best thing that they can do.

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