Special Needs Trust

After our daughter was born we decided that we needed to draft a will in case something happened to us.  Just so we felt comfortable knowing that she was being taken care of in a way that we would want.  Our search for an attorney consisted of simply looking around advertisements and settling on someone who was in our city and capable of doing the job.  We had a will drafted for myself and my husband.  Both were so simple that they were only a few pages long.  Nothing more was needed and we just thought when our second child was born we would add to the existing will.

Well, once our son was born and we realized he had special needs we also, I think instinctively knew that our simple will would not work for him.  In fact, what we ended up having to do was something that we were not familiar with at all and that was to create a special needs trust.

Let me back up a little, once we discovered that our son had down syndrome we also began learning about what services are provided by the government.  At some point, probably pretty on in the process,  we learned that in order for the government to provide services (such as therapies) for my son "free of charge" to us he was prohibited from having too much money in his name.  Specifically, my son cannot have more than $2000.00 in an account in his name at this time (this amount may change in the future).  If he should have more than that he would be disqualified from receiving services from the government.  Obviously with this kind of restriction we knew that we could not leave money or property to my son in a will like a parent normally would.  Thus began our search for an attorney who could draft the proper document that would allow us to leave money and provide for our son in the future without jeopardizing any government assistance.

The first place I looked was on the local state bar association website.  Every state has one and a simple search on the websites can pull up names of attorneys who draft wills and/or trusts or who practice in estate planning.  However, I soon realized when I narrowed my search to those who practiced in this specific area of special needs the list was relatively short and the blurbs on each attorney did not provide a lot of information about whether or not they specialized in this area of law.  So we started asking for referrals from friends and although that proved helpful and I contacted a couple of attorneys, I was still not sure what to do.

Then we found out about the Special Needs Alliance (www.specialneedsalliance.com).  As their website states these are attorneys who practice in disability law and even better on their home page there is a link to find an attorney in your area!  Well, we did just that and found a attorney in our area who drafted a special needs trust that meets the government requirements.  This is a huge relief for us and now we know that our son will be taken care of in a manner that we want when we can no longer care for him and also that our provisions for him will not prevent him from continuing to receive the government assistance that he needs and is entitled to.