Life Care Plan

The Life Care Plan places special emphasis on issues surrounding long life. The Life Care Plan connects your concerns about long-term care as you go through the later stages of your life with our knowledge and expertise at the Elder Law Practice of Timothy L. Takacs. We will be with you and your loved ones every step of the way to assist you in making the right choices.

Quality of Life and Quality of Care
There are three principal goals of the Life Care Plan that we help you develop and implement:

1. We help you or your loved one get good care, whether that care is at home or outside the traditional home setting such as an assisted-living facility, or, if it should be necessary, a nursing home. This is the most important of all goals, for it goes to the very heart of your quality of life in your later years. Your Life Care Plan is focused first on your good health, safety, and well-being.
2. We help you make decisions relating to your health care, long-term care, and special needs. It is a comfort and a relief to our clients and their families to know that they always have a resource of experienced, supportive, knowledgeable, and objective advisors with them every step of the way.
3. We help you find sources to pay for good care, and we will help you spend your money wisely and prudently on your care needs. We help protect and preserve the assets you have accumulated during a lifetime of hard work, thrifty behavior, and astute investment decision-making. We work with you through the maze of choices and options to find the best, or often, the most comfortable solution to the asset protection problem created by the need to pay for quality long-term care.

Your Care Questions Answered
We will help you answer your questions about your long-term care and health care choices:

• What health care, chronic care, and long-term care services are available to me? How can I get the good care I need and desire, whether in my own home, in a residential community or assisted-living facility, in a child's home, or in a nursing home?
• How will financial and health care decisions be made for me if I cannot make them for myself? Who can I rely on to make sure that decisions to be made are the right ones?
• If I can't take care of myself, who will make sure my spouse continues to have a good quality of life?
• If there a health care crisis, what will we have to do? Where do we turn for the help we need?
• How do I know I am getting good care? Who will advocate and intervene for me if necessary to ensure my right to quality health care and long-term care?
  

Other Questions
A Life Care Plan helps you and your loved ones answer other pressing questions as well:

• How do I assure my financial security as I get older?
• What public benefits am I entitled to, and what do I have to do to qualify for them?
• Should I rely on Medicaid or other government benefits to help pay for my care? How do I apply for benefits?
• What kinds of insurance do I need? Should I buy long-term care insurance? Should I join a Medicare HMO?
• How and when should I distribute my assets? Can I save taxes and avoid probate?
• Do I have to spend all of my money on my care, whether in my home or in a residential care facility such as a nursing home? How can I protect my assets to take care of my spouse, to ensure I get good care, or to leave to my children?
• How do I provide for family members with special needs?
  

Your Road Map
Your Life Care Plan will be customized to fit your desires and needs. Your Life Care Plan can then provide you the road map to follow to achieve your care and asset protection goals. And, when changes occur, we stay with you every step of the way to help you shift to another road as it becomes necessary.

Your Life Care Plan therefore includes both elder law and care assessment and coordination services. (Please follow the link to learn more about our Elder Care Coordinators.)

Your Life Care Plan: One Fee, One Time, for the Rest of Your Life
You pay one flat fee for a Life Care Plan. We prefer not to bill clients by the hour for our work. We have found that most clients and their families do not like hourly billing either. We also have seen several problems with piecemeal services, and we want to make sure that a client does not limit the scope of planning services needed simply because of cost. And, where piecemeal services can result in gaps in service, or worse, greater cost in legal services due to the sheer variety and amount of services needed in many situations, our Life Care Plan takes these concerns into account.

Your particular fee for your Life Care Plan will be set in advance based upon the following factors:

• Are we planning for a married couple or an individual? Planning for two persons is almost always more complex than for one.
• Is this is a crisis situation? Is nursing home care actual or imminent? Or do we have time to plan?
• How complex will the planning be? We have found that, as general rule, the larger the estate, the more complex the care planning and asset preservation decisions and plan implementation processes will be. While it is true that many care planning issues do not depend upon the wealth of the person we are planning for, a person of lesser means usually has fewer realistic care options.
• How difficult will it be to access public benefits such as Medicaid?

The one-time fee you pay for your Life Care Plan includes all necessary legal documents, consultations, and other services, including the services of our Elder Care Coordinators, Certified Elder Law Attorneys, and other members of your Life Care Plan team, necessary to implement your "plan of action." And, unless you withdraw from the Plan, your Life Care Plan ends only at your death.

How to Get Started
Please call or e-mail us to set up a first meeting to see whether a Life Care Plan is right for you, at ttakacs@tn-elderlaw.com or call (615) 824-2571.

At your first meeting with us, usually a flat $250 to $400 fee (which will be credited to the cost of your Life Care Plan), we will review your situation and discuss your options. We then will be able to determine the flat fee you would pay for your Life Care Plan.

To download a Workbook (in PDF format) of the information we will need in order to begin the Life Care Plan process, please click on one of the applicable links below:

Life Care Plan Workbook (Individual)
Life Care Plan Workbook (Married Couple)

Life Care Plan Workbook (Individual - Short Form)
Life Care Plan Workbook (Married - Short Form)

To download a sample of our Life Care Plan fee agreement (in PDF format), please click on the following link: Life Care Plan fee agreement.

Click here to download a PDF version of this page.