Fed up of reading threads asking how they can get out of paying care home fees.

And in the real world someone who's scrimped and saved to get their £100k house, who only has a small works pension and state pension.
Isn't going to be able to max out the debt on their house. What bank is going to let someone remortgage their house to give their money to their kids / grandkids. How do they service the debt?

The people with big money yes certainly will pass plenty on when they see a need. The people who can barely afford the house they have just can't.

Sorry @Kandalama but there is no nice NI pot in your name. It was spent. Pensions are a benefit (a very expensive one) paid by current tax payers. Most people take out far, far more than they ever contributed.

UC is obviously means tested. The state pension is not means tested. Your argument is already not holding up!

Paying for a care service, which you are able to afford, is completely different to being unable to work because of an accident aged 30 and needing support. In addition, the costs of care are many multiples what is paid in UC, etc. I'm not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse here in not seeing that these things are different.
You don't seem to want to see it, but the elderly have had and continue to have extremely favourable treatment compared to the young. If they are able to afford care and need the service, they should pay rather than expecting others to do so.
What you suggest about benefit testing becoming even harsher is already happening and will continue to happen. I would be surprised if this doesn't happen with universal pensions in the future too.

This is just it.

People are fndamentally being selfish. Despite claiming they'd be happy to pay higher taxes.

Well, yes, much nicer for you to pay slightly higher taxes and have other workers paying for your care rather than just paying for it yourself, that doesn't make you more moral .

People work their lives and put money away and have pensions, and that is in part so they can use that money they've earned to care for themselves in their old age.

If care is so expensive it can wipe out a whole inheritance, where do people think the tax revenue to replace that will come from - it will come from the people who have enough to give their kids a nice inheritance. So it will be eaten up another way.

Because they’ve paid National insurance contributions which, despite others saying it’s irrelevant, some of us were actually told when we started working that we would get a state pension.
How much people get is directly related to how many years a person has worked and paid in contributions. It’s not the same as using the nhs or UC or PIP etc. You don’t have to work 40years for UC entitlement do you!

Pensions and other benefits work in completely different ways.
the obvious exception is people who get pensions and pension credits etc when they’ve never worked. Those are akin to other welfare benefits.

Have you ever actually seen someone with the later stages of dementia? Who actually died from dementia not with dementia?

No clue who they are?
No clue who the people beside them are?
Soap what's that?

And actually not saying very much. Having someone put food into your mouth.

Dementia is a whole lot more than just a bit of confusion and getting lost.

Residential home costs (or the residential element of nursing home costs) do include things that the resident would have been paying for in another circumstances Food, heat, light, cleaning, maintenance, TV license, wifi. Everyone pays these throughout their lives (with help from benefits only if on lower incomes). All of these are before 'care costs' of staff.

And many people pay rent or mortgage without help from benefits, and the rental of a room in a care home will also have a base cost. If my mum couldn't manage her house anymore and wanted to sell it and use money on renting a bungalow, no one (?) would think the state should pay my mum's rent if she had £300k in the bank from a house sale.

So when totting up the costs on the basis of minimum wage care staff, don't forget all the above.

Nevertheless threads like this always end up the same.
Talk of Take take take ………just because.

Lets take advice from some on here as I’m sure we are all aware anyway Preparation is key in everything financial

dib dib

My point is.
If we means test some we should means test all.
So that would include PIP, UC etc. All means tested exactly the same as pensioners are. Including peoples homes if they are not used to capacity.
If an elderly person needs to move out they don’t need their home…ok. So by the very same concept if a couple need UC let’s look at how many bedrooms they have in their home. If there’s an empty room they aren’t using it so ….. they should have to downsize to free up that unused asset and live off that money.

You see
Doesn’t sound quite so fare now does it.
That should go for every single benefit too. It doesn’t though because it’s so much easier to just treat the elderly differently, it’s so much easier to take from them because they might not be around for the next vote anyway.

Im more horrified that the Government ‘gets’ this unfair treatment of some elderly people whilst people on Mumsnet don’t. Who’d have thought the Government ( that’s the Tory years from the dates on articles on the Govn website) have more empathy and understanding !

But those life mortgages allow you to release equity in your home without paying anything back until you die- I think over 60. So you could provide support to the kids with that income until you might need care. Not endorsing it just saying a way. Especially if your wealth is in your family home.

As the other poster said, pensioners do get supported by the state with universal pensions, despite some of them not needing this @Kandalama. Other benefits are means tested. This isn't a universal thing.

You are assuming people have the cash.
Thats not what the pp was talking about as clearly in their post they said the money was in their home.
( value £100-200k )

What reason will you give for why you did it then, should the question ever arise? Do you pay your son rent? Local Authorities aren't stupid (though plenty are incompetent so you might get away with it for that reason).

@ObelixtheGaul
do you see people standing in the street handing out over £3500 every month to random strangers because that is exactly what is happening to self funders money.
I know there would be plenty of passers by grabbing what they could for free……I also know there aren’t any that do it though.

Why are you conflating two totally different things and situations?
The government needs to encourage people to have children in order to pay taxes and provide services in the future. This is made even more important by the fact that the birth rate has fallen very significantly. Apart from that, the cost of everything for your parents, who haven't had the ability to build up wealth or (often) buy a home of any kind, has risen to unaffordable levels. This was not the case for their parents/ grandparents, who could often manage on only one salary, rather than two.
The care need is totally different. We are discussing people who assets paying for a service that they need. These are people who do have wealth, often because of the sheer good fortune of being born in a certain year and having benefitted from booms in housing and other assets. They have also had the ability to build up pensions and savings through a lifetime of work. There is no economic or political reason or indeed social or moral reason for poorer tax payers to support this group of people to enable their children to inherit lots of money. In fact, it is economically impossible due to current debt levels and demographic patterns.

Probably thinks like private school, helping them a uni, giving them a deposit- maybe taking out one of those life mortgage things so you can help them regularly. So you max out the debt on your house.

There are free hours paid for the tax payer and pensioners get state pensions paid for by tax payers.

It's effectively the same a vulnerable individual requires the service of a third party. That service needs to be paid for if it is not being provided by family members or other interested parties.

How is there other ways to help ensure your children don't need inheritance when you die?
If the vast majority of your money is tied up in your house. Which is only worth a £100-200k

Easy if you've plenty money. Not so easy if the house itself has been a massive stretch.

I think you're getting Inheritance Tax and Deprivation of Assets mixed up. If you make a gift of assets in excess of your IHT allowance and you live over 7 years that's excluded from the IHT calculation and yes, there is a sliding scale. Also, you have to not benefit from your property at all i.e. you must pay market rate rent to whoever you 'sign your house over' to.

For deprivation of assets there is no time limit.

Nursery isn’t the same.
There are free hours paid for by tax payers. None of that is available to the elderly. No free hours. No nothing!
Now if pensioners had 30 free hours if they earn less than £50,000 / year then that would be equal.
But there’s nothing
Lets also not forget that parents are young enough to still be working. So they earn year on year whereas the elderly are not of working age so everything is being taken out of savings or by selling what they own. No one paying nursery fees is selling their house or jewellery to do so.

people get benefits irrespective of some assets. Your house isn’t accounted for. Many people could downsize before the state steps in but, quite rightly, they are not required to.

We’re banging our head against the wall because you and others do not understand the concept of equality
whilst this countries attitude unwittingly creeps towards communism.

It’s truly shocking
and as I’ve noted even Governments acknowledge the system is wrong.

Now if everyone was means tested for everything including property and chatel assets before they received a penny from the taxman for any form of benefit then fine. But that isn’t the case. So either we are all equal or we are not and clearly many people still don’t believe in equality in this country……What a disgrace.

Before you bang too hard, you haven’t said why you think I shouldn’t pay for some things the state provide and not others.

it’s not a ‘benefit’. No more than the nhs is. It’s something I pay for, along with nurseries, schools, etc.

@nahthatsnotforme

Itll be the same with the nhs soon.. those who can pay will have to

We're already there. Lots of people now have to pay for private dental care because they can't get a place on the NHS. Lots of people are having to pay for private GP appointments, because they can't get an NHS one.

My OH needs an annual MRI scan to monitor his bone marrow cancer effects. He can't tolerate the NHS tube scanners as the scan takes around 45 minutes. So he needs an "open" one, which the NHS don't provide in our area, so he has to pay £1,200 per year for a private MRI scan. (And even then the NHS oncologist keeps losing the results but that's another story of NHS incompetence!).

So im guessing then you believe those on all non means tested benefits should be means tested

All those claimants of PIP and Attendance Allowance for example. All those homeowners getting wfa.
Let’s not forget homeowners in general that get benefits. Why don’t they have to downsize to free up their assets before they get any help.

You see!
Its called discrimination

Also as @nahthatsnotforme clearly points out as well it’s a state benefit that you get if you need it.

NO. Good grief. You need the care, but you can pay for it. You need the BENEFIT when you don't have the money to pay for it yourself. Self-funders have the money in assets and savings. So they don't need the BENEFIT to get the care. Bangs head against wall