When you’re the one who knows them best — who carries the plan after you?
Life insurance built specifically for families raising a child with special needs — designed to protect benefits, fund the trust, and keep working long after you can’t.
You’ve already thought about it.
The 3 AM thought. The “what if” that no other parent in your circle quite gets. The conversations you have with your spouse in the kitchen after the kids go to bed.
“What happens to them — when we’re not here?”
You’ve spent years becoming the expert on your own child. Their routines. Their providers. The way their world has to be arranged so they can move through it safely. The hardest part of this question isn’t financial. It’s that no one else can replicate you. What we can do is build the structure so the people who step in have everything they need — and your child keeps every benefit they’re entitled to.
The four mistakes that quietly cost special-needs families everything.
A standard life insurance payout can disqualify your child from SSI and Medicaid overnight — wiping out benefits that took years to qualify for.
Special Needs Trusts must be funded correctly — and most parents don’t know how. A trust on paper isn’t the same as a trust that’s actually ready.
Siblings often become default caregivers — without resources, without warning, and with no clear authority to act.
ABLE accounts, SNTs, and life insurance work together — but only if they’re designed together. Most agents only touch one piece.
A life insurance policy is not a plan. A coordinated plan is a plan.
Most agents will sell you a policy. The right approach is to design coverage that funds the trust that protects the benefits that cares for your child.
That’s the actual work. Most agents skip steps two, three, and four — because they’re not paid to do them. I am, because that’s the whole job.
When you’ve spent years learning how to advocate for your child, you deserve an agent who’s spent years learning how to protect that advocacy.
How I work with special-needs families.
- Works with your existing attorney and financial planner — or refers you to specialists who do this work all day
- Designs coverage to fund the Special Needs Trust correctly, not directly to your child
- Reviews benefits eligibility before recommending any policy structure
- Annual review — because your child’s needs change, and your plan should too
- Coordinated with ABLE accounts and existing public benefits
- Independent — represents multiple carriers, recommends the one that fits your situation
The questions special-needs parents actually ask.
Only if it’s structured wrong. A payout that lands in your child’s name will count as a resource and can disqualify them. A payout that flows into a properly drafted Special Needs Trust does not. The structure is everything, and that structure is exactly what I design for.
Most special-needs families need some amount of permanent coverage in the mix — because the need doesn’t expire when a term policy does. Term is great for stacking additional protection during peak earning years, but the foundation of a special-needs plan is usually permanent coverage that’s guaranteed to be there whenever it’s needed.
We work in the right order. If a trust isn’t in place, we plan the coverage around getting one set up, and I’ll refer you to special-needs attorneys I trust. The policy and the trust have to be coordinated — getting either one without the other leaves a gap.
This is one of the most important conversations special-needs families have. The plan can be designed to provide for your child with special needs and protect your other children from being forced into caregiving roles they didn’t choose. There are ways to do this fairly — and we’ll walk through them.