Elder Law
The Elder Law practice of O'Connell and Aronowitz serves the specialized legal needs of seniors and their families, including asset preservation, planning for potential incapacity and tax planning.
We will work closely with your accountant, insurance agent, financial advisor, and other professionals to ensure your elder law needs are addressed in a comprehensive manner.
- Asset preservation – ensuring your assets are preserved is a primary focus of our elder law practice. The need for homecare, assisted living care, or nursing home care can quickly deplete the resources that seniors have spent a lifetime accumulating. Our attorneys are skilled in navigating the ever changing legal landscape regarding what is allowable in planning for those expenses, including Medicaid planning, long term care insurance, and private pay options. Whether you are healthy and making long term plans or older and face an imminent nursing home stay, we can help you and your family develop a plan that ensures your needs are met and your assets preserved, to the fullest extent possible.
- Planning for incapacity – making sure your financial and personal needs are met, even when you’re no longer able to manage your affairs, is an important part of our work. Through the use of specialized powers of attorney, customized health care proxies and living wills, and other advance directives, we can ensure your wishes are carried out and your best interests are protected. Our advance directives are designed to work with our trust documents and other planning devices to produce a comprehensive plan that will meet your needs in the event you are no longer able to handle your personal and financial decision-making.
In the event proper advance planning has not been done, we can assist in an application for guardianship or the establishment of a special needs trust. In the event the guardianship proceeding becomes contentious, our attorneys are fully capable to seeing the case through litigation to a successful result. - Tax planning – Whether you are engaging in asset preservation strategies or planning for incapacity, tax issues inevitably figure into the decision-making. The attorneys in our Trusts, Estates, and Elder Law Department, including two attorneys who are also accountants, are well versed in the tax issues that impact elder law planning and will be there to assist you to minimize any adverse tax impact on your income or resources.
Our attorneys regularly give seminars to local community groups on elder law, estate planning, and estate administration. We are active members of the Elder Law Section of the New York State Bar Association, the Trusts and Estates Section of the New York State Bar Association, and the Trusts, Estates and Taxation section of the Albany County Bar Association.
Related Practice Areas: Trusts, Estates and Estate Planning, Tax Law, Health Law
Please contact Fred Wander in our Albany office for more information. In Plattsburgh, please contact Heidi Dennis. In Saratoga Springs, please contact Matthew Dorsey.
Links:
NYS Department of Health - Medicaid Information
U.S. Government Medicare Information
