What is an Elder Law Attorney?

We represent older persons, disabled persons, their families, caregivers, and those with special needs. We provide medicaid/estate planning, crisis medicaid planning, life care planning, nursing home admissions, and strategies on how you can keep more of your lifetime savings, the family home, farm, and business.

• Medicaid and Division of Assets
• Nursing Home and Assisted Living
• Veterans Benefits
• Hospice Care
• Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and other Degenerative Illnesses

We assist in preparing and filing Medicaid applications, division of assets, expanding resource allocations, VA benefits, help with bill paying, care management, and housing alternatives.

A great deal of our time involves helping individuals or couples qualify for Medicaid and preserve assets from Medicaid spend down and recovery.

Property ownership, special transfer allowances, application for hardship review, Miller trusts and family-beneficial use of spend down monies are areas where our services can protect family members and healthy spouses from undue hardship. Elder lawyers, through advice and guidance, can often accelerate the Medicaid approval process saving the family a great deal of money. This often more than compensates for the investment made.

In addition to Medicaid planning, they also help elders and their families with all types of issues. Below is a partial list of what an elder or Elder Law attorney might do:

• Preservation or transfer of assets seeking to avoid spousal impoverishment when a spouse enters a nursing home
• Medicaid qualification and application and Medicaid planning strategies
• Disability planning, including use of durable powers of attorney, living trusts, “living wills,” for financial management and health care decisions, and other means of delegating management and decision-making to another in case of incompetency or incapacity
• Conservatorships and guardianships
• Estate planning, including planning for the management of one’s estate during life and its disposition on death through the use of trusts, wills and other planning documents
• Probate
• Administration and management of trusts and estates
• Long term care placements in nursing home and life care communities
• Nursing home issues including questions of patients’ rights and nursing home quality
• Housing issues, and home equity conversions (reverse mortgage)
• Life Care Planning
• Veteran’s Benefits

Richard M. Barron, Elder Law Attorney

Richard M. Barron, J. D. founded his law firm in Whitesboro, Texas in 1991. He is a graduate of Southern Methodist University where he studied business and finance at the undergraduate level receiving a BBA in 1977. Mr. Barron received his Juris Doctorate from the Texas Tech University Law School in 1981 and has had a successful Texas Real Estate, Personal Estate Planning and Elder Law practice since 1981.

Since 1981, Mr. Barron has written and lectured about Elder Law issues. In addition to publishing a monthly newsletter, he has co-authored:

• The Texas Nursing Home and Assisted Living Guide
• The Consumer’s Guide to Medicaid Planning and Division of Assets
• The Consumer’s Guide to Hospice Care
• The Alzheimer’s Survival Kit
• The Consumer’s Guide to Veteran’s Benefits, for Veterans or their widow

Mr. Barron lectures frequently on Elder Law issues to professional and citizen groups on the legal issues faced by individuals and families who have a loved one with a chronic, disabling illness.

Mr. Barron is a member of the Texas Bar Association and the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. He holds a Second Degree Black Belt in Tae Kwan Do and is a Veteran of the Viet Nam War. In Viet Nam, Mr. Barron served as a Warrant Officer/ helicopter Aircraft Commander and is the recipient of twenty eight air medals, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Metal for Valor, the Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and the Vietnamese Cross for Gallantry. He and his wife, Glenda, live in Lake Kiowa, Texas with their Bull Terrier, Brutus.