About Living Trust Plus™

Whether you're rich, poor, or somewhere in between, you cannot afford to ignore the potentially devastating costs of nursing home care and other types of long-term care. Nursing homes are the most likely and one of the most expensive creditors that most Americans are likely to face in their lifetimes.

Consider the following statistics:

• About 70% of Americans who live to age 65 will need long-term care at some time in their lives, over 40 percent in a nursing home.
• As of 2008, the national average cost of a private room in a nursing home was $212 per day or $77,380 per year, and the national average cost of a semi-private room was $191 per day or $69,715 per year.
• On average, someone age 65 today will need nursing home care for approximately three years. Twenty percent of individuals will need nursing home care for more than five years.
• Fifty percent of all couples and 70 percent of single persons become impoverished within one year after entering a nursing home.
• Long-term care is not just needed by the elderly. A study by a large insurance company found that 46 percent of its group long-term care claimants were under the age of 65 at the time of disability.
• Contrast the above long-term care statistics with statistics for automobile accident claims and homeowner's insurance claims:
• Between 2005 and 2007, an average of only 7.2% of people per year filed an automobile insurance claim.
• Between 2002 and 2006, an average of only 6.15% of people per year filed a claim on their homeowner's insurance.

Almost everyone who drives has auto insurance, and almost everyone who owns a home has homeowners insurance, yet only about 10% of the population have Long-Term Care Insurance. The other 90% are totally at risk for winding up financially destitute because of the need for nursing home care.

The best time for you to address this problem is when you do your Estate Planning. It is estimated that only 30% of Americans do estate planning – an absurdly low percentage, but still this is three times greater than the percentage of people who purchase long-term care insurance. The reason you should address the problem of long-term care while doing estate planning is that the best estate plan in the world won’t matter a bit if all of your money is used up in connection with long-term care.

Most people doing estate planning use a revocable living trust to avoid the hassles and expenses of probate. There are hundreds of books and thousands of Web sites devoted to the revocable living trust, and it is widely recognized by attorneys and consumers that a revocable living trust is tremendously superior to a Last Will and Testament as an estate planning tool. This web site does not attempt to explore in depth all of the benefits of a revocable living trust, but will highlight some. Readers not familiar with all of the benefits of a revocable living trust should obtain one of the many other excellent books on this topic. One of the best is the seminal book on the topic -- The Living Trust : The Failproof Way to Pass Along Your Estate to Your Heirs, by Henry Abst.

Mr. Abst essentially created the revocable living trust industry when he published his book back in 1989, which quickly became and still is the “bible” on how to avoid probate.  Evan Farr remembers it, because he started practice back in 1987, two years before his book came out, and at that time no one was doing living trusts; they were essentially unheard of.  Even though Living Trusts had been used as far back as 16th century England, Mr. Abst came along just 20 years ago, put together all the puzzle pieces, wrote a book explaining it, and completely revolutionized the estate planning industry. 

Evan H. Farr, a Certified Elder Law Attorney and Certified Estate Advisor, is now doing the same thing for the Living Trust Plus^TM that Henry Abst did for the revocable living trust.  The Living Trust Plus^TM is quickly revolutionizing the Estate Planning industry by offering an estate planning alternative that provides consumers with all the best features of a regular living trust PLUS the extra and vital benefit of asset protection that consumers are so hungry for, especially in this terrible economy where most people have already seen their life savings gutted by more than half. 

Won't a Revocable Living Trust Protect My Assets from Nursing Home Care and Other Creditors?

No. A revocable living trust protects your assets from the expenses of probate, but does not protect your assets from the expenses of long-term care while you're alive. A revocable living trust can be designed to protect assets from the creditors of your beneficiaries after you die, but this does not help you while you're alive. A revocable living trust provides NO asset protection at all for you while you're alive. Since you have total access to the assets inside your revocable living trust, so do your creditors, including the most likely and most expensive creditor of all – nursing homes.

So What's the Solution?

In response to this problem, Certified Elder Law Attorney and Estate Advisor Evan Farr developed a unique solution – a special type of asset protection trust called the Living Trust Plus™ that functions very similarly to a revocable living trust and maintains much of the flexibility of a revocable living trust, but protects your assets from the expenses and difficulties of probate PLUS the expenses of long-term care while you're alive, PLUS lawsuits and a multitude of other financial risks during your lifetime. The Living Trust PlusTM Asset Protection Trust protects your assets from lawsuits, auto accidents, creditor attacks, medical expenses, and -- most importantly for the 99% of Americans who are not among the ultra-wealthy -- from the catastrophic expenses often incurred in connection with nursing home care. For most Americans, the The Living Trust Plus™ is the preferable form of asset protection trust because, for purposes of Medicaid eligibility, this type of trust is the only type of self-settled asset protection trust that allows a settlor to retain an interest in the trust while also protecting the assets from being counted by state Medicaid agencies.

Even though the Living Trust Plus™ is "irrevocable," it can still be revoked so long as the trustee and all of your beneficiaries agree to revoke it. Additionally, you retain a very high degree of control over your trust assets because:

• you can be the trustee if desired;
• you retain the right to receive all of the trust income;
• you retain the right to live in and use your real estate;
• you retain the right to change trustees; and
• you retain the right to change beneficiaries.