An Independant Life

Meet Kristen, she is 11 now and she has Down Syndrome. Her parents (my niece and her husband) are trying to make sure that as an adult she can live a strong, independant life. So they have to setup a trust fund for her - and just getting the help of an attorney to do this is an expensive venture.

To help, I now have an etsy shop, http://www.inallthingsart.etsy.com/. (Link is on this blog.) 30% of all sales will go to help Kristen. And I have a basic machine quilting service (ie...3 allover designs offered). From that service now thru Feb 09, 30% will also go to Kristen's trust. (Leave a comment with request for information/pricing if you are interested...thanks.)

This is what my niece shared with me.....

"We are having to set up a special needs trust for her when she turns 18, b/c the way the laws are set up, she can not have any more then $2K to her name otherwise she loses all of her disability benefits. So we spoke with a special needs planner that got us in touch with a special trust lawyer that will set it up for us- but its not cheap. So we are hoping to at least get enough $ going to pay for the lawyer to set up the trust. There are so many things that we were not aware of that really could have negatively impacted Kristen's ability to take care of herself as she gets older. A lot of slightly disabled people like Kristen like to get jobs and be self-sufficient to some extent, but it seems the gov't puts road blocks in their path to make it that much more difficult. I was talking to a woman here at work that I walk with- her brother was born with an oxygen deficiency, so he is mildly retarded, and when they went to get benefits for him, they said he made too much $ to qualify even for Medicare- b/c he worked a minimum wage job- she was completely unaware of the special trust that they could set up for him- b/c no-one tells anyone anything. They just deny claims- and don't give alternative options to people. So her brother refused to quit his job, and is w/o any insurance coverage. She said that she is going to look into the trust option. We were lucky that we were introduced to this special needs planner- otherwise I feel we would have been facing the same problem when Kristen aged out of our insurance coverage."