If you and your siblings convince your aging parent to move in with one of you, it might be a good idea to have a family meeting about this. Your parent might want to compensate the sibling that decides to provide care for him or her, and this is something you should talk about as a family. As a family, you might want to discuss how this will work, and you should determine if you need a personal care agreement.
What is a Personal Care Agreement?
When a parent moves in with an adult child, the adult child will take on responsibilities, and the parent will likely want to compensate the child for these duties. A personal care agreement is a legal document used to record the details of this agreement. It will state two main things:
- What the responsibilities are of the caregiver (the adult child that will care for the parent)
- What the compensation will be from the parent to the child
Creating a personal care agreement is important for a variety of reasons, but the main reason is to keep peace within a family. Without an agreement, you may have upset family members that believe the caregiver is trying to take advantage of their parent. You can easily avoid this by talking about this subject and creating the agreement together.
How Does This Affects Medicaid?
While this type of agreement can prevent family disputes, it is also vital for issues relating to Medicaid. If your parent will probably need to go to a nursing home or long-term care facility at some point in the future, it is vital to have a personal care agreement.
With this legal document, your parent will have proof that money given to a child was done legally. This is important for qualifying for Medicaid. Medicaid looks into a person's financial history to see if the person has given away cash to family members.
If the person had, he or she might not qualify for long-term benefits with Medicaid. If the cash was paid for home care services (even if it was paid to a family member), the person will still qualify for Medicaid. This agreement can be given to Medicaid as proof that the money distributed was for home care services.
Creating a personal care agreement is important for many reasons. If you are in the process of trying to move your parent to your house or the house of a sibling, you should talk to a family lawyer, such as the Law Office of Ernest A Buche Jr., about creating a personal care agreement.
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