Should a trustee of a supplemental needs trust consult with an attorney to administer the trust?
When you're dealing with supplemental needs trusts, or also known as special needs trusts, we're dealing with a disabled individual. Usually a disabled individual may be an adult child who has a developmental disability, or maybe someone later in life who has suffered from an injury and now needs programs of government support to provide for their healthcare. If you are not working with an experienced elder law attorney who can provide you with guidance on how to administer the trust or how to make distributions from the trust, then certain distributions can cause those programs of government support to be jeopardized. We would not want to do that if you have someone very much relying upon government programs of support such as SSI or Florida Medicaid.