Care home fees

Venting I have no idea what posters are banging on about either or why they chose to do it on your thread.

hope you are making some progress.

I didn't suggest that is what you are after nor anyone else on here. It is very difficult for people like you who know the money is there but is tied up in house and could take a very long time to access to spend on your mother's welfare. It can restrict your choice of home in that if the LA are paying upfront with a charge on the house then you have to go for somewhere that takes LA funded people even though your relative will be self funding once the sale goes through.
However in RL there are quite a few people of this nature (the money pages of weekend newspapers have these questions quite frequently) and some members of my extended family have been surprised when I said I had sold mums house to pay the care fees

We have a charge on my parents house

As often as not the person with dementia doesn't know/care/remember about what is happening in the outside world and is very unlikely to go and visit their old house again.
My point is that some family members do not want their inheritance to be spent on care home fees and will project this onto the person in the home not wanting the house to be sold.
Have had this with "D"BIL who said that MIL should be cared for at home so the house didn't need to be sold but wasn't prepared to do the stuff between visits from carers.

Funnily enough as soon as the person has died and care bills cease the lead sibling (who may have never darkened the door of the care home) is out of the blocks to the estate agent. Well, obviously, because it's not going to upset the person now they're dead, is it?

I think fifties might have posted on the wrong thread.

"Lead sibling?" You projecting a bit there, fifties?

It does seem odd to me how families are so against selling the "family home" in order to pay care fees and say how upsetting for the person in care. If the person in care has dementia then the home they talk about is often one of their childhood or full of their young children and not the silent empty house they have recently left.
Funnily enough as soon as the person has died and care bills cease the lead sibling (who may have never darkened the door of the care home) is out of the blocks to the estate agent.

I’d start by contacting the OPG

details at the foot of the page when you scroll down

www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-of-the-public-guardian

Hi OP, I'm fairly sure that the local authority will pay the fees until the house sale, then will take the amount back from the sale of the house. It doesn't really matter how long the house takes to sell, the amount owing will just increase until it does sell.

Look at your local council's website, there should be info. Our council has a Financial Assessments Team under Adult Social Care who deal with it all & you can phone them & ask them. If your mum has a social worker they should be able to help too.

Fees vary widely so continue looking about - we were quoted £465 for residential only recently so lower rates exist (his wife is nhs funded 1:1 care at £1100 a week)

The PoA was drawn up by solicitors several years ago, so I think they registered it. If they registered it, there will be a stamp on every page from the Court of Protection showing that it's been registered. I can't remember the wording, but it's a circular stamp about an inch across.

Attendance allowance should not be taken away from the person if they go into a care home and self funding ("D"MIL still gets it and it pays for a about half a day or week of her fees) may be different in Scotland and Wales. You would quite likely lose your carers allowance as you are no longer looking after someone for over 35 hours a week.

Happy thanks. We have done that but I got confused and thought maybe there was an extra step.

Attendance allowance was taken back from us when il went into self funded home.

When you fill out the poa forms you need to send them off with the fee and it gets registered with the opg. They send you back the stamped authorised copy and a covering letter with the reference number. Without registering them they cannot be used. The financial one can be used as soon as its registered if the person wishes but the health one is only valid if they lose capacity. The old lpa only.covers finances. You will need to provide the stamped original copy when needed.

just a thought if you are self funding, are you claiming attendance allowance ?

I'm confused about this "registering" business.

I thought after the Office of the Public Guardian sent LPA, that was it? We have it, but didn't realise we would need to do something else with it.

our neighbour went into a care home and her son rented the house out for around 5 years before she sadly died. He said that he did have to top up by around £150 per month but it meant that he didn't rush into selling the family home etc, may be worth considering.

Both types of poa have to be registered before they can be used. You can apply to the court for deputy ship if she lacks capacity.

My mums care home were happy to wait until her house was sold. It took a few months and then we just settled the arrears.