§ 0.1 Reference

Topics Covered

The full contents of this reference, arranged in the order that usually makes sense to read them. Nothing here is a service listing — each entry is an article.

People arrive at this material from very different directions. Some are doing everything early and in order. Many more arrive mid-crisis, because a diagnosis has landed or a parent has fallen or a sibling has died without a will. The sections below are ordered for the first group, but every page is written to stand alone for the second.

Estate planning

The documents that decide what happens to your property and your medical care. This is the foundation: almost every problem described elsewhere on the site is easier when these exist and harder when they do not.

• Texas estate planning: the core documents — the will, the durable power of attorney, the medical power of attorney, the directive to physicians, and how community property changes what you can actually give away.
• Revocable living trusts — what a living trust does, what it does not do, and why the case for one is weaker in Texas than the marketing suggests.
• Irrevocable trusts — the trade of control for protection, and the look-back consequences of making that trade too late.
• IRA inheritance trusts and the SECURE Act — how the ten-year rule rewrote retirement-account inheritance, and where a trust still earns its keep.
• Dynasty and grandchildren's trusts — multi-generational trusts, the rule against perpetuities as Texas now writes it, and the generation-skipping transfer tax.
• Charitable giving — bequests, charitable remainder trusts, donor-advised funds and qualified charitable distributions.
• Asset protection under Texas law — the homestead exemption, personal property exemptions, retirement accounts and life insurance, and why Texas residents already start with more protection than they think.

Medicaid and elder law

How Texas pays for long-term care, who qualifies, and what the rules penalise. This is the densest material on the site and the area where errors are most expensive.

• Medicaid and elder law in Texas: an overview — the programmes, who administers them, and how they differ from Medicare.
• Long-term care eligibility — the medical test, the income cap, the countable-resource limit, and how a married couple is assessed.
• Crisis planning — what is still available after admission, when nothing was done in advance.
• Six costly mistakes — the errors that recur, including the one that causes the most damage: giving the house to the children.
• Estate recovery — the state's claim against the estate after death, and the exceptions and waivers that limit it.
• Qualified income (Miller) trusts — the mechanism that resolves the income cap, and the administrative discipline it demands.
• Key figures and where to check them — the numbers that change every year, and the official pages that publish them.

Special needs planning

Leaving resources to a person with a disability without disqualifying them from the means-tested benefits those resources were meant to supplement.

• Special needs planning in Texas — the benefits at risk, the supplement-not-supplant principle, and how ABLE accounts fit alongside trusts.
• Three kinds of special needs trust — third-party, self-settled (d4A) and pooled (d4C), and which one a given situation calls for.
• Letter of intent, taxation and life insurance — the non-legal document that matters most, how these trusts are taxed, and how families fund them.

Probate and administration

• Probate and estate administration in Texas — independent versus dependent administration, muniment of title, small estate affidavits, the four-year deadline, and what an executor is actually required to do.

Veterans' benefits

• VA Aid and Attendance — the pension supplement for wartime veterans and surviving spouses who need help with daily activities, including the net-worth limit and the three-year look-back introduced in 2018.

Reference

• The article archive — shorter notes and the topic index carried over from this domain's earlier archive.
• Texas legal resources — law libraries, legal aid, agencies on aging, and the government pages that publish the operative figures.
• About this publication — what it is, who it is not, and its editorial rules.