An Estate Plan That Knows You Served

Most estate plans are written as if the client's biggest assets are a house and a 401(k). For a veteran, the picture is bigger: monthly compensation, potential pension, health coverage and education benefits for survivors, burial honors, and a set of federal rules that decide whether your family keeps or loses those benefits when you die or need care.

Patrick Nolan is a veteran, a VA-accredited attorney, and the author of The Dead Man's Guide to Estate Planning. This page is about making Missouri estate-planning law and federal veterans law pull in the same direction.

What a Veteran's Plan Has to Get Right

The Medicaid–VA Collision (Where DIY Plans Die)

Here's the mistake we see most: a family "spends down" or gifts assets to qualify for one benefit, and disqualifies themselves from another.

• The VA pension program applies a 36-month look-back to uncompensated transfers and can impose a penalty period of up to five years.
• Missouri Medicaid (MO HealthNet) — which pays for most long-term nursing home care in this state — applies its own five-year look-back with different penalty math.
• The annuity or "veterans trust" sold at a free-dinner seminar may satisfy neither.

Because we practice elder law, asset protection, and veterans law together, we design one strategy that survives both rulebooks — and we'd rather tell you "wait eight months" than file something that triggers a penalty.

Burial Benefits: Put Them in Writing Now

Your service earned honors your family shouldn't have to discover by Googling at 2 a.m. after you're gone. Eligible veterans can generally receive:

• Burial in a VA national cemetery — gravesite, opening/closing, and perpetual care at no cost to the family, with eligible spouses and dependents often able to be buried alongside.
• A government headstone, marker, or medallion and a burial flag.
• A Presidential Memorial Certificate.
• VA burial allowances that help with expenses for eligible deaths, at higher rates when death is service-connected.
• Missouri state veterans cemeteries as an alternative to national cemeteries.

We record your eligibility, wishes, and the documents your family will need (starting with the DD-214) directly in your estate plan binder.

How It Works

1. Free consultation. We map your family, your assets, and your benefits — current and potential.
2. Design. You get a flat-fee proposal: will or trust, POAs, directives, beneficiary and titling fixes, and any benefits-protection structures, with the reasoning in plain English.
3. Sign, fund, maintain. We execute the documents, retitle what needs retitling, and stay available as VA rules, Medicaid rules, and your life change.