You know the kinds of wills I’m talking about. The husband leaves everything to the wife, the wife leaves everything to the husband, and after they both die, everything goes to the children. This works well for situations in which the spouses are healthy one day and deceased the next. However, as most of us know, life doesn’t usually happen that way anymore. Some research indicates that 69% of individuals over 65 will require some kind of long-term care in their lifetimes. Thus, many spouses worry that if they predecease a disabled spouse who is currently in a nursing home or will require long-term care at some point in the near future, there will be insufficient funds available to provide for the institutionalized spouses’ needs. This is an especially relevant concern for expenses that are not covered under Medicaid, like a care manager, private nurse, single room, and certain therapies or drugs. Another concern is that the availability of funds from “I love you” wills and trusts will disqualify the surviving ill spouse from eligibility for Medicaid benefits. As you know from prior articles, Medicaid is the only long-term-care governmental program in the United States. Medicare does not cover long-term custodial care. To solve this problem many of our clients rely on a “testamentary trust:” a trust built into the will of each spouse. For many estate planners, this is counterintuitive because much estate planning occurs within the context of a revocable living trust. In order to preserve access to Medicaid eligibility without requiring that the surviving spouse spend down the assets and lose the chance to maintain a “rainy day fund,” creating a testamentary trust in the will of the pre-deceasing spouse is essential. What this means is that around age 55, you have to completely revise your wills and trusts to accommodate a different paradigm of thought. The thinking process is no longer what happens if I die? Rather, the question is what happens if I don’t die and live a long time with expensive long-term care. The new paradigm requires a new estate plan. If you consider yourself middle-class (meaning that your net worth will be significantly impacted by the cost of long-term care for you and/or your spouse) and are over age 55, I suggest that you revise your estate plan to reflect this newer paradigm as soon as possible.