In the day-to-day struggle just to ensure that immediate needs are met, parents of special-needs children often overlook long-term financial planning.

According to a study conducted earlier this year for MetLife Inc., 29 percent of parents of special-needs children who were surveyed said they had taken no action whatsoever to make financial plans for their children, even though 60 percent said they don’t expect their special-needs kids will ever be financially independent.

Mike Fontanini, a financial planner with MetLife, has worked with families throughout the state to establish plans through MetDESK, the company’s Division of Estate Planning for Special Kids.

MetLife brought the program, one of the first of its kind in the financial services industry, to Iowa in July 2004. Last year, Fontanini hosted approximately 25 educational workshops in conjunction with local chapters of agencies that serve children with physical, mental or developmental disabilities, and worked with about 15 families.

“Then about six months ago I transferred up to the Minneapolis area to spearhead the program, and have still been going back and forth to Iowa to service the program there,” he said.

The services MetDESK offers are twofold, Fontanini said.

“We provide an information source for parents, to give them a resource to tap into for financial and legal information for planning,” he said. “The primary conduit is through free educational workshops — free to both the organizations and the families that need the services.”

Second, families can sign up with MetDESK for a free individual review of their financial planning needs. They can also an online calculator available at www.metlife.com/desk.

MetDESK partners with local chapters of The ARC of America, the National Down Syndrome Society, United Cerebral Palsy, the Autism Society of America, the National Organization of Rare Diseases and Special Needs Advocate for Parents.

Mike Deege, a West Des Moines attorney who specializes in wills, trusts, probate, estate planning and elder law, said the most vital need is to establish a trust so that a child doesn’t inadvertently become ineligible for any state or federal benefits he or she is receiving.

“Oftentimes what we do is create a supplemental needs trust for special-needs children,” Deege said. “In it we have to be very careful in the language to state that the supplemental needs will be taken care of … You need to extremely careful with the language.”

Families must decide whether they want to designate a family member, such as a sibling, to act as the trustee or assign that responsibility to a financial institution.

“Or you can have a family member and a bank as co-trustees, so that you have the advantage of combining the knowledge of the family (about the child) with the expertise of the bank,” he said. “That’s sometimes a nice combination to use.”

Life insurance is often a good option for funding a special-needs trust, Deege said.

“The beauty of that is that at a younger age the insurance is less expensive, and you can designate the trust as the beneficiary,” he said. “So it’s a way to segregate assets that could be used to take care of the special-needs child. For the other children you may not want to arrange a trust; you may want to be able to just distribute the funds directly.”

MetLife, which provides the financial planning services at no charge to the family, makes its money through the sale of insurance products or from referral fees paid by companies whose products it offers.

“For life insurance, we’re licensed for about 60 different carriers,” Fontanini said, “and we’re a full-service broker-dealer, so pretty much the whole market is our base to work with.”

  According to a MetLife Inc. study, “The Torn Security Blanket: Children with Special Needs and the Planning Gap”:

– 53 percent of parents have not identified a guardian for their child in the event of their death;

– 72 percent have not identified a trustee to administer the child’s finances;

– 84 percent have not written a letter of intent outlining an agreement or arrangement for their child’s special needs;

– 88 percent have not set up a special needs trust to preserve eligibility for government benefits such as Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income.