As originally referenced in a January 2015 blog post (Link to post), the Pennsylvania ABLE Act was enacted in April to provide people with disabilities and their families with a way to plan for a financially secure future without affecting government benefits. The Pennsylvania Treasury has been working diligently on implementation with the goal of offering the PA ABLE Savings Program by December 2016. This is a very aggressive goal, but they are cautiously optimistic that it can be met.
In order to offer a high-quality ABLE program at lower costs, Treasury helped create a consortium of ten other states that are pooling their resources to offer individual state plans with common elements thereby creating economies of scale much more quickly. The hope is that the PA ABLE program will be among the lowest cost programs in the nation.
Treasury has developed a pre-launch PA ABLE Brochure to highlight some of the features and benefits of PA ABLE.
Please feel free to reach out to your Tucker Arensberg Trusts and Estates lawyer for additional information.
Nora Gieg Chatha is a shareholder in the Trusts and Estates Group at Tucker Arensberg and devotes a large portion of her practice on special needs trusts.