My husband and I are planning on doing a will or maybe a trust, and I was wondering what we should put in particular into it about medical care. We will soon have six kids. My 9-year-old son has cancer. He will most likely survive, but he will need medical monitoring and possibly physical therapy forever, and he will probably need repeated bouts of intensive cancer treatments with breaks in between into early adulthood. His type of cancer generally becomes much less aggressive around the mid- to late-twenties, so if he makes it to around 29 or 30, his medical needs should lighten up significantly then.
We want the kids to go to my sister and brother-in-law, with my parents’ assistance, if something were to happen to us. All our assets go towards first, providing for the kids, second, their educations, and third, (if anything is left at that point) divided equally among them.
We have double insurance for son9, both private and state, and it has done well at mostly covering his medical care. I do have some concerns about when he ages out of being allowed on a parent/guardian’s insurance at age 26, maybe just coming out of school or maybe not done yet, and maybe still in the midst of this long fight against cancer.
My sister and bil’s family have very high deductible insurance through his work that they basically never use because they never meet the deductible. If they were our kids’ guardians and our kids’ qualification for state insurance were based on their income, ds would not qualify. Unless CA has an exemption from income requirements for diagnosis that would allow him to have it, or if the qualifications are different for kids you become the guardian of than kids you are the parent of?
My parents’ insurance might be better, so making them the guardians might be better in that way, but while they are very young for their age, they are in their later sixties and will hopefully retire before too much longer.
What special considerations would you make in a will for a kid’s medical condition? Maybe we should delay distributing the remainder after education costs to the kids until ds is older, beyond the window of when his cancer is likely to cause problems, so it would be there for medical needs first? That might put my oldest into her mid-thirties before it was finally distributed. Not that I am sure that there will be a remainder. We don’t have a ton of assets, raising and educating six kids is expensive, and raising a kid with cancer is more expensive. I hope that with the life insurance it would be enough that it wouldn’t be a financial burden on the guardians, but I could certainly imagine the money running out before everyone’s higher education is covered, depending on how soon a tragedy occurred and how expensive medical care runs in the ensuing years.
My parents would absolutely help in every way, financial and childcare and medical appointments. My husband’s parents intend to give him an inheritance someday that would go to our kids if something happened to him. I don’t think they would help with the regular needs of our kids growing up, but the kids could later pay off student loans and medical bills with that inheritance money if what we left for them didn’t go far enough.
Any thoughts on how to best structure this?
