Your Place or Mine? - Providing Care for Aging Parents
November 14, 2007
Gina M. Barry, Esq.
When an aging parent needs assistance to live at home, many children opt to provide the care personally. Often, the parent will not agree to hire health care professionals to provide care due to their inability to appreciate the decline in their ability to live independently. Occasionally, the parent has concerns regarding privacy or safety, and the only caregiver they trust is their child. Regardless of the circumstances, the caretaker child arrangement conjures up a variety of legal issues.
A caretaker child arrangement begins when either the parent begins residing with the child in the child's home or the child begins residing, or continues to reside, in the parent's home while receiving care similar to that of a facility. When the child resides with the parent in a caregiver capacity, it is common for the parent's home or other assets to be transferred to the child as compensation. When the parent begins residing with the child, normally the parent's home is sold and the proceeds are used to build additional living space for the parent in the child's home or given to the child in exchange for the services the child agrees to provide.
In either situation, it is best to establish a care agreement. This is a contract between the parent and the child, and possibly the child's spouse, in which the parent agrees to pay the child, (in either a lump sum or on an ongoing basis,) or to finance an improvement to the child's home, and the child agrees to care for the parent until either (1) the parent passes away or (2) is no longer able to perform two of the activities of daily living. These include bathing, eating, dressing, transferring and toileting.
When establishing a care agreement, value must be associated with the services provided. One approach involves valuing the services as a package like those at a board and care facility, and this is only feasible when the services rendered are substantially the same as those rendered by such a facility. In this situation, the average monthly cost of the facility may be used in the agreement as the monthly cost of the care provided by the child.
An alternative approach involves...
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by:
Gina M. Barry
BusinessWest
October 29, 2007
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