529 ABLE accounts and supplemental needs trusts for disabled adults - a few bullet points

We set up the legal aspects of a supplemental needs trust for #1 several years ago — including a taxpayer ID for the trust. Then we kind of dropped the ball; I don’t think I quite understood the next steps in setting it up.Today we reviewed current law with a specialist attorney. This is much too complex a topic for me to fully describe in a blog post tonight, but I’ll share some of the key points I wrote about.Special needs trusts, supplemental needs trusts, and, I think, the new 529 ABLE plans all require proof of disability, specifically the inability to work with reasonable supports. (If you think about this too much your head will hurt — especially given current fashion (consensual hallucination) for non-adaptive workplace employment.)The assumption behind all of these plans is that #1, sooner or later, receives SSI benefits of $720/month and medical assistance (yeah, extreme poverty). The old-school approach was for the $720 to be paid to a care business which would use it for from and board and provide $92 (precisely) back for spending money. That approach is now being replaced by fairy dust and wishful thinking by something else that nobody quite understands yet.Somewhere to the side of these SSI payments are something called “waivers”; funds that can be used to pay for a personal care attendant. There used to be a special waiver program for developmental disability but those funds are exhausted. Now there’s one underfunded program of waivers that cove...
Source: Be the Best You can Be - Category: Disability Tags: adult disability law finance Source Type: blogs