Why Long-Term Care Planning is Like Maintaining a Lake House

Pay for the upkeep now or forfeit your property later.

I sat on the deck of my Massachusetts lake house, drawing in the fresh mountain air. It smelled of damp earth and the faint, sweet decay of the shoreline—a stark contrast to the scents of sterile law offices and skilled nursing facilities back in New York. At my feet lay two puppies, peacefully subdued from the kayak's bobbing after an hour out on the water. They were snoring, their wet noses twitching in sync with the rhythm of the dock.

Naturally, the reverie didn't last, as the local fauna lacks respect for an attorney’s valuable respite.

The lake was perfectly calm, a gray sheet of zinc reflecting the pines, until the geese ruined it. They arrived in two distinct waves. First came the vanguard, gracefully grazing the water’s surface like feathered seaplanes, leaving neat V-shaped wakes behind them. Then came the chaotic rear guard, gaggles dive-bombing from afar, hitting the lake with all the elegance of dropped bricks, leaving errant floating feathers in their wake. Down the shoreline, a golden retriever became triggered by the incessant honking of geese defending adversely possessed property. A tight flotilla of ducklings flanked by elders navigated the reeds near my dock, the adults keeping a sharp eye out for the local pike. Beneath them a submerged bass minded eggs, motionless and vigilant, awaiting the spawn while a curled strip of white birch bark drifted lazily overhead.

The sun increased in strength while I peered at the water glimmering, mirroring the soul—or at least mirroring my own seamed face back at me. These are simple sounds and scenes, yet they are powerful reminders of the force of nature.

That reminder becomes increasingly important as we age, if only to cure us of the delusion that we can avoid the inevitable erosion of our own infrastructure.  Lake house maintenance is mandatory, not elective. Clearing dead pine needles from the gutters and checking the shoreline retaining wall for cracks is tedious, preemptive work, the domestic equivalent of asset protection. If you don't do crisis planning for your roof before the storm hits, you end up with catastrophic structural failure. In my line of work, that looks like a stroke without a durable general power of attorney, leaving your family to scramble to petition for an emergency guardianship while the rain pours through the ceiling.

Long-term care planning is exactly like managing a lake house: you either pay for the upkeep now, or you forfeit the property later.

As an elder law attorney who has spent decades preaching the gospel of proper proactive planning, I know how fast a legacy can rot from neglect. People avoid irrevocable trusts the same way they avoid scraping the peeling paint from the lakeside deck. They ignore the dry rot, hoping they’ll be the one exception to the rule of decay. But ignoring the five-year Medicaid look-back period is no different than ignoring a leaking dock piling. By the time the wood rots through and the dock collapses into the muck, you are completely out of time for a more reasonable fix. You are left spending down your retirement savings on expensive care, watching the inheritance bleed dry because you refused to implement a plan when you had the chance.

Nature operates on this same transparent, unforgiving system of involuntary conservatorships. The lake doesn't file a hardship waiver against the winter freeze; it simply loses its capacity and succumbs. The bass don't draft a health care proxy to protect their spawning beds from the predatory encroachment of bluegills; they either maintain physical competence or they are liquidated.

At the lake, there are no retroactive planning strategies for broken pipes, and absolutely no sympathetic caseworkers when the shore erodes your foundation. The biological clock ticks toward an inevitable final accounting, completely indifferent to your attempts to protect the principal.  The best we can do is to execute a sound estate plan, secure the property, and then sit back and watch the geese drop their feathers on the water. At least, then, your legacy is well-preserved, and nobody can claim that you lacked the capacity to manage your own shoreline.