Professional expertise shaped by personal experience. FamilyVest combines CFA/CFP rigor with the lived understanding of families navigating ABLE accounts, special needs trusts, and lifetime care funding.
$2,000.
That is the SSI asset limit. A single well-intentioned gift, a life insurance policy named to the wrong beneficiary, or a general inheritance without a properly structured trust can disqualify your child from Medicaid, SSI, and the waiver services they depend on. The rules are unforgiving. The stakes are permanent. The planning has to be precise.
Discussing special needs financial planning with Prof. Kent Smetters Listen
This isn't an advisory practice that happens to serve special needs families. This is a practice built because we live this reality at home. Todd has two sons with autism. The financial complexity, the regulatory maze, the stakes, the fear of making one wrong move that costs years of benefit eligibility—he doesn't advise on it theoretically. He navigates it daily.
That changes everything. Other advisors know ABLE accounts. Todd knows what happens when a parent passes without a funded second-parent SNT in place. They understand Medicaid rules. He understands the weight of funding a child's lifetime care while protecting their benefits. The difference between knowing the mechanics and understanding the reality is the difference between generic advice and a plan that actually works.
FamilyVest exists as it does because of this. Every client benefits from that foundation—families with complexity deserve advisors who understand it.
Special needs planning isn't a single product or account type. It's a system where each piece protects and enables the others.
The Gulf Coast corridor from Destin through Niceville has a meaningful concentration of special needs schools, ABA providers, therapy centers, and parent advocacy networks that is unusual for a region of this size. For families already here, we know this community. For families considering relocation, we can speak directly to benefit portability, Medicaid waiver waitlist strategy, and the estate planning implications of a state change.
This is not a general observation about a nice place to live. It is a planning consideration that most advisors in most cities cannot address.
Special Needs Resources
Destin · Niceville · 30A
Schools, therapy centers, ABA providers, and advocacy networks — one of the highest concentrations per capita in the Southeast.
Different life stages require different plans. We stay with your family through all of them — from the first conversation to ongoing stewardship across decades.
Before we look at a single account or benefit form, we need to understand your child — their current level of independence, their care needs, what a good adult life looks like for them, and what keeps you up at night. This is the conversation most advisors never have.
Special needs planning has four distinct domains: Life, Resource, Financial, and Legal. We map all four together so nothing falls through the cracks. We also model your child's lifetime care costs — a number most families have never quantified — and identify the gap between what benefits cover and what the family must fund.
This phase varies most by family. A family with a minor child has a different conversation than one whose child is aging out of school services. We model scenarios, identify structural risks, and coordinate with your attorney and CPA before a single document is drafted.
Your comprehensive plan is delivered with specific recommendations across all four planning domains — Life, Resource, Financial, and Legal. It includes clear next steps for your attorney, a benefit application timeline, and a Letter of Intent framework that tells the people who come after you who your child is and what their life should look like.
A special needs trust is not a standard investment account. The risk profile, liquidity needs, and distribution strategy are different. We build the investment policy around the lifetime care plan, not a generic allocation model.
Special needs planning has five distinct life stages — and each requires a plan update. Benefit rules change annually. Families make well-intentioned gifts that trigger benefit loss. Children age out of services. Parents die. We stay with you through all of it.
Most families come to us after something went wrong — a gift that triggered benefit loss, an estate plan that named the wrong beneficiary, a trust drafted without Medicaid coordination. We would rather be the first call than the repair call.
If you have a child with a disability and you are not certain your plan is right, that uncertainty is worth a conversation.