My mom turns 96 this year. She entered private pay assisted living in California a few years ago. Her needs are custodial, not medical as yet. Despite heart condition & increased frailty, she is going strong. Her assets will be used up in a few months. I have DPOA & family chose not to set aside any trust accounts to protect her assets. We were advised by lawyer to spend down, then apply for Medicaid. Wonder now whether failing to protect her assets was a stupid move?
But no matter what you'd done a few years ago, she'd still be 96 now and still be needing custodial care. She will now need to be on Medicaid soon. If you'd done things differently, maybe she would have been on Medicaid a few years ago. How would she be better or worse off?
Are you wondering if you should have tried to protect her assets so that family could have inherited something? Or are you thinking that she would somehow be better off now?
I hope that your mom has at least taken care of her burial/cremation expenses. If not, that could be something she spends down her remaining funds on.
Could you have put some money aside in a way that it was available for family to inherit while taxpayers paid for Mom's custodial care? I don't know, and I'll be interested to see if others have direct experience with that.
Second - in regards to your decisions as POA and your mothers assets - what's the point in second guessing now? What's done is done. I am DPOA for my mother. When it became necessary for my mom to have 24/7 care I decided to place her in a nursing home - it was a tough decision but along with my brothers, we believe it to be the right choice. The thing is - my mom didn't want to go into a nursing home. Mom wanted to stay in Assisted Living with 24/7 paid caregivers in addition to the high cost of AL. Could we have done that? Yes - but mom would have run out of money at a little over two years. Then mom would have been at the mercy of Medicaid instead of having her own room with a sliding glass door that goes into a private landscaped courtyard complete with rock sculpture fountain - shared with only five other residents of the 35 at her beautiful, new nursing home. I ask myself every now and then if I made the right choice. I mean, would mom even make it another two years? And given moms current mental and physical condition would she have been able to notice any difference? As it is, mom is about to hit the one year point - she is on hospice but just got an extension having surpassed the initial six months - if I had gone with what she wanted half her money would be gone - with no immediate end of life in sight. You can't keep second guessing your choices and decisions - as long as you did what you did with your mothers best interest at heart - leave it alone and move on.