Should You Ever Buy an Immediate Annuity at a Bank?
The “financial consultants” or “investment advisors” at banks don’t seem to know much about how MassHealth works, so my suggestion is that you never buy an immediate annuity at a bank without running the idea by an elder law attorney, such as one found via the National Elder Law Foundation.
Within the past month, a financial planner at a Plymouth bank suggested that one of my clients, a married person who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, buy an immediate annuity with the funds in his IRA. This pressurized sales attempt occurred after his wife explained that she had met with me and that the plan was to be moving funds to her name.
The relentless selling of annuities at that bank appears to have no bounds. The clients involved in this situation were initially pressured by other people at the bank to meet with the financial consultant, then tried to cancel and received further pressure to keep the appointment.
Here’s why that financial consultant’s annuity idea was atrocious: When one member of a married couple buys an immediate annuity (which can be similar to buying a short-term pension) and soon thereafter needs nursing home care, that check will continue to be received by the institutionalized spouse, and will be treated as the institutionalized spouse’s income for MassHealth purposes. Therefore, the funds that were invested into that immediate annuity, which could have been preserved for the at-home spouse if sensible financial planning had been done, usually are essentially lost. (For further explanation, see Protecting Assets and Maximum Income for the Community Spouse When Applying for MassHealth in 2013 to Help Pay for the Unhealthy Spouse’s Nursing Home Bills in Massachusetts)
You might think that someone who claims to have been an investment advisor for many years would have learned in detail about how annuities are treated by MassHealth, but you should not ever make that assumption when you are dealing with a bank. That is yet another reason not to be buying annuities at banks, where they may not even realize that they are causing financial harm to some married senior citizens.
Massachusetts Estate Planning, Probate & Elder Law 
Good article. In California, no annuity purchase by either spouse would be necessary to render the IRA as non-countable. However, if owned by the institutionalized spouse, the MRD’s would go toward his SOC. For this reason, it sometimes makes sense to liquidate the IRA, incur the tax, and transfer funds to the ownership of the At-Home spouse, but this is a case by case decision after one “runs the numbers”. Alternatively, sometimes the full MRD’s can be reallocated from the Ill spouse over to the At-Home spouse even without a liquidation, if the latter needs more Spousal Allocation to make up her MMMNA.
Most financial advisors have no idea as to how these issues impact couples such as your clients.
The fact that you lump all bank advisors into one category speaks volumes to your understanding of how the business works. You are correct there are many advisors out there that are commission driven and clueless. But there are plenty of us who put extra hours in to familiarize ourselves with the MassHealth protocols and policies so that we can best work with our clients and their attorneys on the best plan for them. With all the recent policy changes there are actually a few contracts out there that are MassHealth and medicaid friendly. While they are few and far in between those of us who actually have the knowledge and simply want to utilize them to help those in need are usually cut short by people like you who are short sighted and have little to no knowledge of our industry and who some of us are.