Estate Planning

A bill recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives would finally allow military retirees to name special needs trusts as beneficiaries of Survivor Benefit Plans, a change that could dramatically improve the lives of military children with disabilities.

Help is available for families of children with special needs whose private health insurance will no longer cover children once they reach a certain age. The new federal health insurance law requires many private insurers to allow children to remain...

A California mother recently went to great lengths to obtain an inheritance from her deceased son's special needs trust, but a court decided that her attempt went too far and awarded half of the trust to the woman's ex-husband, even...

A Virginia court has ruled in favor of a 29-year-old woman with Down syndrome and refused to grant her mother's guardianship petition. The court chose to name the woman's friends and employers as her guardians instead, as she had requested...

More states are choosing to expand Medicaid services for people with low-incomes and the Department of Health and Human Services has just released regulations to ensure that people with disabilities will receive the coverage they need from private health insurers.

When a family has more than one child with special needs, the last thing it wants is more complexity. At the same time, most families with multiple children with special needs are stretched financially and desperately need to preserve access...

If you are taking on the responsibility of serving as the trustee of a special needs trust you will need a "go-to" reference guide that you can refer to. For most trustees, the 2020 edition of Managing a Special Needs Trust:...

A 29-year-old Virginia woman with Down syndrome is fighting her mother's attempt to obtain guardianship in a case that has drawn attention to the tenuous balance between laws that seek to protect people with special needs while affording them maximum...

In a recent New York case, an institutional trustee has been ordered to pay back a special needs trust almost $180,000 for its failure to make certain that the beneficiary qualified for available public benefits.