Disability Planning
We work with families who want a deliberate plan for a child with a disability. The work begins with asset design, continues through the legal vehicle that protects how those assets flow, and extends across the decades the family wants the plan to hold.
What happens to my child when I'm gone.
Every parent of a child with a disability carries that question. The page that follows is the answer in its working form, the actual financial structure that addresses it. It begins with the fears that sit behind the question, and moves through the substance of what we help families build.
Over a lifetime, an underfunded plan slowly compromises the day to day. Facilities are downgraded, services are dropped, the standard of care erodes one decision at a time. The child does not know what their parents intended. They only know what they live with.
Without a funded plan, the responsibility passes to whoever is closest and most willing. A sibling who never agreed to it, an aunt or uncle who steps in out of love, an extended family member who carries decisions they were never resourced for. Their lives reshape around a structure no one designed.
With the financial structure built deliberately, neither outcome is left to chance. The plan provides the care across the child's lifetime, and it does so without becoming someone else's burden along the way. That is the work, and the sections that follow describe how it is done.
Long-term funding for a child with a disability is a structural problem, not a documentation problem. The question is not which forms to sign, but what asset will be there in year forty, when the parents are no longer there to manage it. We build the answer to that question first.
The funded structure is designed around the family's specific resources and the child's specific care requirements. It accounts for the expected length of care, the standard of living the family wants to preserve, and the inflation of medical and residential costs across decades. It is calibrated, not assumed.
The asset is what continues. The documents direct it.
Once funded, the structure is built to continue functioning regardless of what happens to the parents. Its job is to keep providing across the rest of the child's life, in the same way an income would have, without depending on market timing or a single account performing as planned.
Estate documents, beneficiary designations, and trust language all attach to this funded structure. They direct how it flows, but they do not create it. The order matters: the asset comes first, the legal documents come second, and the rest of the plan organizes around them.
A Special Needs Trust is the legal vehicle that allows the funded structure to support the child without disqualifying them from SSI, Medicaid, or other benefits that depend on the child's countable assets remaining below specific thresholds. The trust is the difference between assets that help and assets that disrupt.
The trust does not hold the assets at design time. It holds them at distribution time, when the parents are gone and the funded structure begins flowing to the child. Drafted correctly, it directs how those funds are used, who has authority over decisions, and how the child's standard of life is maintained.
The trust is what protects the asset on its way to the child.
Our role is to coordinate the design of the trust with the family's estate attorney, who handles the drafting. We do not write trust documents. We make sure the funded structure and the trust are aligned to the same purpose, so the asset and the vehicle that protects it both serve the family the way they were intended to.
Beyond the funded structure and the trust, three coordinated decisions determine whether the plan actually works the way it is designed to.
For a child whose benefits eligibility depends on remaining below specific asset thresholds, every will, beneficiary designation, and account titling needs to be re-examined. This is not a generic estate review. It is a coordinated rewrite of how the family's assets are positioned at the moment they transfer.
The plan has to address how the day to day will be managed, what facility or in-home structure is funded for, and how the standard of care is maintained across the decades that follow. These are not assumptions to inherit. They are decisions to design.
That role carries financial decision-making, advocacy, and judgment, usually for the rest of the child's life. Choosing the successor trustee, and equipping them with the institutional support to do the work well, is its own piece of the plan.
Your child, your family, your current resources, the existing documents you may already have. Before any plan is drawn, we need to understand the people it is being drawn for.
Assets, accounts, beneficiary designations, existing trust and estate documents, the working relationships you already have with attorneys and CPAs, the standard of care you are aiming to provide.
The funded structure, the trust pairing, the estate coordination, the successor trustee architecture, the long-term care framework. Some pieces apply to every family, some are specific to yours.
Once the plan is approved, we coordinate the implementation alongside your existing attorney and CPA. The funded structure is funded. The trust is drafted and aligned. The estate documents are updated. The plan begins.
We meet with you regularly, more often when life changes and less often when it does not. The plan is revised as the child's needs evolve, as the family's resources change, as legal and tax conditions shift. The structure is kept in alignment with the family it serves.
A Disability Planning consultation begins with listening. Your family, your situation, your child, and the structure you want to build for them.
