Owning a Home Without Money to Spare
In this second installment on the topic of home ownership and persons with disabilities, I will offer an example of the complications the trustee might face.
I am the Trustee of a special needs trust established for an adult woman named Sasha. Although Sasha faces special challenges due to certain disabilities, she has achieved a level of independence as an adult. Sasha attends a daily work program and assists her family with household chores at home. Her residence has been modified to accommodate her needs, with an elevator to her bedroom and an open floor plan. Sasha’s biggest challenge is transferring from her wheelchair to a toilet. Accordingly, she needs help from an aide several hours each day when she is home alone without her mother’s assistance. If the aide is late, Sasha has been stranded in her wheelchair waiting for assistance, which is frustrating and sometimes humiliating.
The special needs trust I manage for Sasha owns the house in which she and her mother live. Trust funds are being depleted to pay for Sasha’s many expenses which include the costs of the home. Unfortunately, there are no other assets available to help the family, as Sasha’s father passed away and her mother’s income alone is not enough to carry the costs of the home and the daily help from the aide.
As Trustee of Sasha’s Trust, I am helping the family figure out their options. We have discussed downsizing, which would involve my selling the residence and purchasing a smaller, handicap modified home. As Trustee, I know this plan may be very difficult if not impossible to achieve, due to the scarcity of accessible homes on the market. In addition, for this option to work, any new home’s purchase price would need to be significantly lower than the sales price of the current residence titled in the Trust. Even if we were to exchange the current residence for a less expensive home for Sasha, the family still would be faced with the challenge of having too little income to cover Sasha’s current needs. As the Trust assets continue to decline, the only solution to the family’s concerns may be to sell the current house and rent a handicap modified home or apartment. The time to make that decision is long before the need arises. There are limited handicap accessible residences in the Washington DC area.
Moreover, the Trustee must be sufficiently empathetic. The person with a disability may have become very accustomed to their home and moving might have a negative impact upon their mental health.
In this case, Sasha’s mother was amenable to the idea of moving and downsizing. She was able to locate an appropriate but smaller house in a less desirable community. The sale of the larger house created some liquidity in the trust to meet Sasha’s needs for a few more years.
In part three of this series, I will present the details a Trustee must consider regarding real property ownership for a trust serving persons with a disability.
Evan J. Krame