So my wife's grandparents have decided they want to give away some of their money to their grandkids. A total of $8000 to just my wife and her two siblings (they have other grandkids but I'm not sure what their plans are for them).
The concern I have is, they really need to be in assisted living. Her Grandpa is in total denial about it right now, but they really have poor health, and one way or another, I think they'll end up there soon. They are also not very wealthy (or at least have always lived like they're poor) so there's a good possibility they would eventually run out of money and need to apply for Medicaid to pay for assisted living.
Now I'm not an expert on the rules but I remember attending a seminar on retirement/estate planning where they talked about this and how they (the govt) will look at your financial records for the previous five years and make sure you didn't just give away your assets/money to your family before you "ran out of money" and applied for Medicaid, and if they find you did, they apply a penalty which essentially requires the family to give the money back to pay for their assistance until Medicaid can kick in.
The reason I've posted here is I'm having a hard time finding specifics on these rules using Google searches. Her grandparents wrote the whole $8000 check to my wife (she's the oldest and most responsible) and we're supposed to disperse the shares of it to her siblings. Her siblings are financial black holes and will spend all of their share in very short order. I'm concerned that her grandparents may need to apply for Medicaid sometime in the next five years and the financial audit will reveal they wrote a check to us for $8k.
Can someone tell me if there is a limit on this? Is there a max they can give away before incurring a penalty? I just don't want to be having to cough up $8k in 3-4 years (one third of which only went to us). Thanks in advance!
tl;dr Wife's grandparents want to give away $8k to grandkids. I think they may need Medicaid to pay for assisted living in the near future. What are the specific rules for giving way straight Cash to family with regards to the penalty that can be incurred by Medicaid?
Submitted May 19, 2019 at 12:49AM by jessej421 http://bit.ly/2JRReCL
