Special Needs Planning
Provide for your child without costing them what they already have.
An inheritance left the ordinary way can end the benefits your child depends on. Planned properly, the same money sits alongside those benefits and pays for everything they do not cover.
The problem nobody warns you about
Leaving money to your child directly can be the most expensive thing you ever do for them.
Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid are means-tested. The resource limits are low enough that a modest inheritance, arriving in your child’s own name, can end eligibility. Not reduce it. End it. And what goes with it is often not the monthly check but the Medicaid coverage attached to it, which is frequently the only thing paying for the care and services your child actually needs.
So the family spends down the inheritance on things the state was already covering, re-applies, and waits. The money you left to make your child’s life better bought them a gap in their care instead.
None of this is obscure. It is just that nothing in an ordinary will, beneficiary form, or online estate planning kit knows to ask whether one of your beneficiaries receives benefits.
How it is solved
The special needs trust
The government allows money to be held in trust for a person with a disability without that money counting as theirs. The trust owns it. A trustee spends it on your child’s behalf. Because your child never has the right to demand the money, it is not a resource, and eligibility survives.
The mechanics are specific, and they are where these trusts go wrong. Funds generally cannot be handed to your child as cash; the trustee pays third parties for the goods and services your child needs. Distributions for some categories of expense reduce the SSI payment while others do not, which makes the trustee’s judgment part of the plan rather than an afterthought.
There is also a distinction that matters enormously and is easy to miss. A trust you fund with your own money is a third-party trust, and whatever is left when your child dies goes where you direct, typically to your other children. A trust funded with your child’s own money, because they received an inheritance or a settlement directly, generally has to repay Medicaid first. Those are very different outcomes, and the difference is usually decided years earlier by whether anyone thought to route the money through a trust in the first place.
What actually breaks these plans
The trust is the easy part.
A properly drafted special needs trust that nobody funds, that the grandparents do not know about, and that is contradicted by a twenty-year-old beneficiary form on a retirement account is not protection. It is a document in a binder.
So the work is the coordination: retitling what should be retitled, getting beneficiary designations pointed at the trust rather than at your child, having the conversation with the wider family, choosing a trustee who will still be capable in thirty years, and deciding what happens when your child turns nineteen and Alabama starts treating them as an adult.
Who we are
Where this fits with everything else
Special needs planning is not a separate product bolted onto a plan. It is your own estate plan, designed with one beneficiary whose inheritance has to arrive differently. That usually means the trust sits inside the same structure that handles the rest of your family, which is why we would rather talk about the whole picture than sell you a single document.
An ABLE account is often worth having alongside the trust for smaller, day-to-day amounts your child can control themselves. Whether it fits depends on when the disability began and what else is in place, so treat it as a question to ask rather than a box to tick.
Our team of attorneys handles this work for Alabama families, and we would rather you left a first conversation knowing what your situation actually requires, including when the answer is less than you expected.
Common questions
The things parents actually ask
Can I just leave my share to my other children and trust them to take care of their sibling?
Families do this constantly, and it fails in ways nobody intends. Money left to a sibling is legally the sibling's money: it is exposed to their divorce, their creditors, their car accident, and their own estate plan if they die first. It also depends on a relationship staying warm for forty years. None of that is a criticism of your other children. It is just not a structure, and your child with a disability deserves a structure.
What happens when my child turns 19?
In Alabama that is the age of majority, and it arrives whether or not your child can manage medical decisions or money. At that point you no longer have automatic authority over either, and the options narrow to court-appointed guardianship or conservatorship unless less restrictive tools are already in place. This is the single most common thing families are caught by, because nothing announces it.
Do the grandparents need to know about this?
Yes, and this is worth a real conversation. A well-meaning grandparent who names your child directly in their own will, or on a life insurance policy or retirement account, can undo the entire plan without ever knowing they did it. The fix is simple once everyone understands it: gifts intended for your child get directed to the trust instead.
Does a trust mean my child loses control of their own money?
It means the money is held and spent for them rather than handed to them, which is the mechanism that keeps benefits intact. How much say your child has in that, and who makes the calls, is a design decision we make with you rather than a fixed template. Capacity varies enormously, and so should the plan.
Find out what your child’s plan actually needs.
Fifteen minutes on the phone, no charge, and no obligation to book anything afterward.