{ "item_title" : "The Plan That Outlives You", "item_author" : [" Ellen Marsh "], "item_description" : "You have read the articles. You have a folder on your laptop with forty-one things in it, nine of which are the same article saved four times. And you feel further from acting than you did two years ago, which you have quietly filed as evidence of some flaw in yourself.It is not a flaw. Nobody has ever given you the order.Every guide to special needs financial planning explains what a special needs trust is, from the beginning, as though you had never heard of one. None of them is written to be second. So you have a pile of correct answers to questions asked in no particular order, and no way to know which of the fourteen things on your list are free and expiring versus expensive and able to wait.This book is the sequence.It starts by taking away the thing you have been most afraid of, because it has been the wrong fear. The greatest risk to your child is not how much you saved. It is where the money is pointed. A family with $40,000 routed correctly can produce a better adult life than a family with $400,000 routed badly - and the arithmetic inside will show you exactly why. Meanwhile the single most valuable asset in your child's entire plan costs nothing and expires quietly: a place in line for a Medicaid waiver, where the average wait for an intellectual and developmental disability waiver ran about 37 months in 2025.Inside, in order of urgency rather than by your child's age: The one-page sequence - every move ranked by cost, reversibility, and what expires. Items one through seven total about eleven dollars.ABLE accounts, current for 2026 - including the change effective January 1, 2026 that expanded eligibility to disability onset before age 46, which almost nobody has been told about, and the $20,000 contribution limit that no longer tracks the gift tax exclusion.The retirement account mistake - the beneficiary form you filled out at a job orientation years ago overrides your will, and it is pointed at your disabled child in the most damaging way the tax code permits. There is a SECURE Act provision written for your child specifically, and your financial advisor has probably never mentioned it. Free to fix, twenty minutes per account.How SSI and Medicaid eligibility actually work - including the rule that changed on September 30, 2024, when food came out of the in-kind support calculation entirely. That single change makes a great deal of advice still in print simply wrong.Special needs trusts, first-party versus third-party, and pooled trusts - with a decision tree whose outcomes include not yet, an answer no seminar will ever give you.The eighteenth birthday - treated as the legal cliff it is, with a ladder of options that starts at supported decision-making and climbs only as far as necessary, because the most common expensive mistake in this field is a frightened parent filing for full guardianship when a HIPAA release would have done the job.The conversations that actually block you - word-for-word scripts for your mother and her $500 birthday check, for your other child and the unequal split, and for your brother-in-law before he says yes to a trustee job he does not understand.The letter of intent you keep not writing - with the reason it is unfinished after six years, which is not that you lack a template, and a six-sitting method that gets it done twenty minutes at a time.The document no estate plan contains - an hour-by-hour account of the first week after you are gone. Who gets the call. Who has the door code. Who knows to put on the second Cars movie and sit on the floor without talking.Written in plain language for parents, guardians, grandparents, and adult siblings, with every state-specific question paired with the exact office to call and the exact words to say.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/819/203/9798192031506_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "14.95", "online_price" : "14.95", "our_price" : "14.95", "club_price" : "14.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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