When your child turns 18, something important happens that many special needs families don't fully appreciate: your legal authority as a parent largely disappears. Even if you've spent your child's entire life making medical, educational, and financial decisions, those legal rights generally transfer to your child once they become an adult. For many young adults with disabilities, that transition creates an important planning question: Who has the legal authority to help make

Introduction Managing life with a disability is challenging, whether it affects you, your child, your sibling, or someone else you love. For parents especially, each day can feel like a balancing act of therapies, school meetings, doctor's appointments, challenging behaviors, and sometimes simply learning how to communicate with your child in a way that helps them thrive. Looming over all of that are the bigger questions: How am I going to keep doing this for the rest of my l

Funding a special needs plan can feel overwhelming. There are a lot of moving parts: parent resources, government benefits, ABLE accounts, special needs trusts, and more. Many families know they should have these tools in place but are not entirely sure how they fit together. I like to think about special needs funding in terms of rivers and reservoirs. Rivers represent ongoing sources of income or services that flow in and flow back out as they are used. Reservoirs represent

Special Needs Trusts Explained If you are a parent of a special needs child, one question likely keeps you up at night: “What will happen to them when I am no longer here to help?” Because this question creates so much anxiety, it is easy to set it aside and focus only on the day-to-day challenges that need our more immediate attention. But the earlier you prepare for that inevitable transition, the less painful it becomes, for all of those involved. Building a lifetime

What is an ABLE Account? Welcome to Special Needs Planning Insights, my new blog focused specifically on financial and life planning for families with special needs. As a parent of two adult children with special needs myself, I understand firsthand the constant search for trusted information related to the needs of my child. There are many stages to navigate, and each comes with important financial, legal, medical, and practical decisions. You are planning not only for y