Elder Law Attorney in Rockville, Maryland

What services do you provide in the area of elder law?

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Elder law is a very broad concept of planning for individuals as they get older. Traditionally, elder law has been all about protecting your assets if you enter into a nursing home. Today, it’s almost more about protecting your assets if someone’s going to scam you. So, I have many clients, or kids of clients, who’ve come to me and said, “I’m worried that my mom is gonna get scammed by someone making a telephone call.”

One of the biggest scams today is a telephone call people get and it says, “Hey, your grandson is in jail. He just got arrested for DUI or something. Don’t call anyone – he’s really embarrassed – but please go to Western Union and transfer $20 thousand to this account so he can be got bailed out of jail.” And elderly people get fooled, and they go to Western Union and they give up that money.

So, to me, the biggest planning we can do for someone as they get older is how we can position their assets, how we can give control to someone else so that they won’t be scammed, so that they won’t lose their money by a telephone call in the middle of the night, or someone coming to their house and saying, “Oh, you’ve got to replace your roof for $50 thousand.”

Again, elder law is a whole big area of law. It’s also about abuse in nursing homes. It’s about making sure the right person is gonna make the right decisions for you. It’s about getting VA benefits if someone needs help.

It’s, again, protecting assets so they don’t have to be used if you enter into a nursing home. We do some of that – we don’t do all of that. Really, the aspect we don’t do is crisis Medicaid planning, but besides that, when someone comes to us in advance, we’re able to position their assets, their plan, in a way to protect them from people that’s gonna defraud them, people who’s gonna try to take their money from them, nursing homes, and the like.

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Washington, D.C. estate lawyer Gary Altman talks about the services he provides in the area of elder law.

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