If your client has a tax-deferred annuity that is causing problems with Medicaid or VA eligibility, it can be easily cashed out. To do so, the client will need to contact the insurance company that issued the annuity and request a complete liquidation. The insurance company will return the annuity's present value, less any applicable surrender charge. The surrender charge is a penalty that applies when an annuity is terminated before its maturity date. The surrender charge will be a percentage of the annuity contract's present value - usually between 1% and 10%. The normal maturity period for a tax-deferred annuity contract is between two and ten years.
If your client is facing a long-term care situation or a terminal illness, and has entered a nursing home or hospice, the surrender charge may be waived if the tax-deferred annuity contains a nursing home confinement or terminal illness rider. For the rider to be applicable, the stay in the nursing home or terminal illness condition must be for a continuous 90-day period. A careful review of the contract will disclose the actual requirements.
If the tax-deferred annuity has been annuitized, the aforementioned rules no longer apply. In other words, the insurance company that issued the tax-deferred annuity contract will no longer cash it out, as a result of a formal request or nursing home confinement. The only alternative at that point is to get the annuity contract valued on the secondary market by a company such as J.G. Wentworth, and sell it to a family member or to the company that valued it. However, if the annuity contract involves tax-qualified funds, even companies like J.G. Wentworth are not willing to value or purchase it. The reason for this relates to the fact that none of the funds have ever been subjected to income tax, and a tax-qualified account cannot be alienated, assigned, pledged, or transferred without creating a prohibitive transfer.
