Without many realizing it, every person has some estate planning needs. Before it is too late, get to know the kind of protection you need in case something unexpected happens. In this episode, Genevieve Gribble from InterVivos talks about family estate planning. What is more, she also takes us into her special needs advocacy. She brings up several points of information that are critical for families of children with special needs.
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Estate Planning And Special Needs Advocacy With Intervivos’ Genevieve Gribble
Genevieve is an attorney with Inter Vivos and we met at the BNI group. We even had an opportunity to work together on a special advocacy case. When I first met you, Genevieve, you were talking about estate planning. Tell me how you got into it.
When I went to law school, that was not on my radar at all. I had no interest in estate planning, but I always had the impression that estate planning was for people who are old. When you get to 65, then worry about your estate planning. Right after I passed the bar, one of my cousins who was 29 at the time, died unexpectedly. He left a widow and four little children. He had no estate planning done. Things were in a mess. She didn’t pass away as well. That would have been a catastrophe. I was able to go to their little town and work with an attorney to get things in order. One of the biggest things was that he owned a business and there were a lot of questions about what would happen to the business now that he was gone and without appropriate safeguards in place for how that would pass. I became passionate about estate planning and the fact that every person has some estate planning needs. It may not be something big, but there are some documents that probably fit every individual need to make things run more smoothly when something unexpected happens.
We think of it as someone who has to be wealthy or own a lot of stock or property, but this was a young family.
When I say, “Have you done your estate planning?” People’s impression is the big iron gates of an estate. That’s not what we’re talking about. Usually, what we’re talking about is, “Do you own a home? Do you have minor children?” There are other red flags but those are two major ones. Many people own a home and many people have minor children. Those are things that would alert us that there is some estate planning need that’s beyond power of attorney.
It’s more important than who manages the income and the property is who’s going to take care of the children?
That should be on every parent’s mind. What happens if I get in a car accident? What’s going to happen to my kids? Who are they going to go to? Are they going to end up in foster care? Are they going to end up with the last person on earth that I want to have them end up with? That often happens. Any interested party can petition the court for guardianship. You might have a sibling that you think, “There is no way on earth I would ever trust that individual with my children.” They may end up getting their children. That happens.
We were together on special advocacy. How did you get involved with that?
I have a brother with special needs. I grew up in a home where there are a lot of special education issues that often arose. That was on the back burner by the time I passed the bar and got started in doing estate planning. My twin sister has two children and they’re both boys. They’re both children with autism. When her oldest son was five, he attended the special kindergarten at the school district. She wanted him to go to the neighborhood school and the school district said, “No.” He will be bus five miles away to this other school. She was concerned about that. She came to me and said, “Genevieve, you’re an attorney. Get Taylor into the neighborhood school. That is not my area of expertise. That’s not the law that I do. She was interested and I wanted to help. Through a couple of mentors, I was able to figure it out. We got things worked out with the school district. Taylor was able to go to the neighborhood school. That was during the spring of kindergarten and he would be starting in first grade.
A couple of weeks before school started, we got a call from somebody from the school who had attended a two-day legal conference. Because of this great knowledge that she now had, she knew that Taylor would not be able to receive certain services. This threw us into a big problem. He would be going to school but he wouldn’t be receiving certain services. I needed to write a letter to the school district. This was a confrontational letter. In estate planning, I don’t do the confrontational law. I was unprepared for this. I spent a whole Friday writing this letter. I knew that it was what I needed to send. It started out, “My name is Genevieve Gribble. I’m an attorney and I represent this.” It was confrontational. I had to be comfortable with that. I sent the email at about 4:30 and I completely lost it. I thought everybody at the school district is going to know my name. They’re going to say, “Genevieve Gribble is not a nice person. She is confrontational. She sent this email.” I freaked out.
While you’re living, get the work done and things taken care of instead of waiting until it’s too late. Share on XIf there was a way you could have retracted it, is that what you’re saying?
I would never have retracted it because I knew I needed to send it. I felt so uncomfortable. The next morning I woke up early and I was going to it all over again. I had this impression come into my mind, “This is not about you. This is not about your ego. This is about Taylor. If you do not speak for him, he will never be heard.” At that point, I decided it was time to ante up. Whenever I am representing an individual with special needs, in the back of my mind I have this motivation, “If I do not speak for this person he won’t be heard. If I don’t do good work for this person, their needs are not going to be met.”
It motivates me incredibly to get things done and to find ways to make things work. Over time, my two passions were estate planning and special needs advocacy started to come together. Working at Inter Vivos is perfect. This law firm, all we do is estate planning. We do every aspect of estate planning. In most law firms, estate planning is a little category and it’s a little subsection. In this law firm, it is what we do so we can specialize in the areas that we feel most passionate about. I feel passionate about special needs. I get to do lots of special needs planning. It’s amazing. I love it.
In our neighborhood, we had a 50-year-old woman who was intellectually disabled. She had been cared for by her parents, by her mother, and her mother passed away. Fortunately, they had done this. It had been arranged that she went to live with her sister. There wasn’t any, “What’s going to happen to her?”
At the moment, tragedy strikes. That’s not the time to go, “What should we do? What do you think? What could we put in place?” That is not the moment to do it. Our firm’s name Inter Vivos means While You’re Living. It’s this reminder that while you’re living, get this work done and get these things taken care of at that moment instead of waiting until it’s too late in some cases. I do special needs estate planning. It is an area that is fascinating. I love it. There is some common entity I want to talk about. There are some common planning mistakes that parents make when they have a child with special needs. Here’s a common problem, your child with special needs may be receiving permanent benefits.
They receive an inheritance and those government benefits are wiped out. They no longer qualify because their income and assets are suddenly too high. What happens is that a lot of times parents will disinherit their child. They say, “If my child is getting a large sum of money means that they lose government benefits then I won’t give them anything.” This is a problem that we see in a lot of health planning. The thing is that money could be useful if it was planned for appropriately. It could raise the standard of living that the child can enjoy rather than that substandard which is a standard that you have when you’re receiving government benefits. We do not recommend that you disinherit your child.
Another planning mistake and this goes along with disinheriting in a child, they’ll say, “We will give his portion to a sibling.” Let’s say that Joey and Jimmy are brothers. Jimmy has special needs. Joey is the older brother who has a good relationship with Jimmy and they get along well. The parents say, “We’re going to give Joey this double portion. We’ll leave it out to him to take care of Jimmy.” In a perfect world, that could work. Let’s say that Joey gets married which is likely and his wife doesn’t like Jimmy. That could happen. She may say, “I’m not interested in his brother.”
That relationship could change. It could change to a point that Joey receives this money and there are no strings attached to it. If it’s left to Joey, it’s Joey’s money. He doesn’t necessarily have any reason to use it for Jimmy or to use half of it for Jimmy. You also run into a problem where let’s say that parents die. A month later, Joey dies. He has received effectively and he was alive long enough to receive the inheritance. When he dies, that money goes into his heirs at law. It does not go to his brother. There’s a lot of things.
As estate partners, we want to make sure that we have crossed every T, dotted every I. We’ve provided the safety net so that we don’t have these unexpected outcomes that are damaging. There is another problem that is waiting to launch or obtain guardianship. Sometimes, if you have a child who does have some debilitating special needs, it is wiser to get that guardianship once the child turns eighteen rather than waiting for a number of years. Maybe that child goes off on their own, even though they’re not competent to do that and goes through a lot of bad experiences. You want to make sure that you do it first so you always have a hand in it. In a guardianship, this person does not become your puppet.
It enables parents to go on doing what they are going to do for their child. Guardianship is a big thing. If you don’t disinherit, but you don’t want to lose the benefits, what can you do? There are several different tools. Nowadays, there are more tools in a parent’s toolbox than previously. We have third party special needs trust. We have first-party special needs trust, which are newer and we have ABLE accounts. If you want to leave your child with special needs a portion of your estate, you can leave it to them in a third-party special needs trust. This third-party trust means that the child with special needs doesn’t have any ownership over any of the assets within that trust.
The money there cannot be counted as their assets for receiving government benefits. Let’s say that you have doting parents and they leave Jimmy a big load of cash. They do it outright. Right away Jimmy is like, “He’s got all this money and you’re going to put it away.” That would be a first-party. You’re putting it into a first-party special needs trust. The first-party means that the individual special needs has a right to draw on that account. They can go into that special needs trust and they can get money out because it was their money that was put in. They maintain an incidence of ownership over that. It does not disqualify them for government benefits but the government has to be the residuary beneficiary on that trust account. The government can do estate recovery after the individual with special needs passes away. On the third-party special needs trust, that’s not the case. The individual special needs has never owned anything that in that third party trust.
Can they benefit from the proceeds?
Yes, they are the beneficiary but they have no rights over the assets.
Do they not lose their benefit?
Yes, the ABLE account is great but you can’t hold real property in it. You could hold real property in neither of those trusts. There are many reasons why you might want to do that. The limits are high. It’s close to $100,000 before it would start to infringe on those government benefits. On that ABLE account, the government is beneficiary after the individual with special needs passes away. They can reach in and do an estate recovery after that individual has passed away.
During their lifetime, they have that without losing benefits.
Yes.
That’s good to know. I talked to a mother whose daughter with a disability is in a wheelchair, and able to live on her own, take care of herself, but has such a strong aversion to shots. She would not agree to get a shot if her life depended on it. Her mother wanted guardianship to be able to say, “Give her the shot.” Explain how that would work.
There are various forms of guardianship. Court’s favor limited guardianships. A guardianship removes the rights from the individual with special needs and gives those rights to the guardian, any capable individual.
Statistics show that the average inheritance lasts seven months because most people are not accustomed to having a large sum of money. Share on XCould it be a sibling?
Yes, they can become a guardian. The rights of the guardian are often comparable to being a parent of a minor child. They are overarching. Those rights can be limited. You can have a guardianship that’s limited to residential. You can have a guardianship that is medical. It sounds like that’s what your friend would prefer.
There are some individuals with special needs who could not wisely handle a large monetary gift.
The statistics show that the average inheritance, that’s not because an individual with special needs has it. That’s any inheritance. Most people get a large sum of money and they’re not accustomed to having a large sum of money and they think this will never end. Usually, within seven months, it’s gone. We do recommend that you put a few strings on it.
I’ve heard that with winning the lottery too. You’ll be amazed at how fast and how much money you can burn through in a short amount of time. Those are good things for families to know. Thank you for bringing those up.
You’re welcome.
We’ll talk to you again.
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About Genevieve Gribble
Genevieve Gribble, attorney at law with Inter Vivos, talks about her work in Estate Planning and Special Needs Advocacy. She offers valuable information for families of children with special needs.
Visit their website to learn more.