Person going into care home thinks they have avoided selling their house to pay fees?

Maybe there is a way to avoid selling your home and then the LA take care of you. But you don't get your choice of home and they can be awful - avoiding feesmis in no way a."win". I felt that mum's home should laid for her care and it was the best way to see it in my view. Yes it cost but it was her money and she was happy there - Worth it!

@NotImpressedByYourBragging my parents were advised by a solicitor to do this, I was very dubious and went to see a different solicitor who advised that it’s really not a good idea, the LA can still come after you for deliberate deprivation of assets, and you’d just be wasting the money it costs to set up the trust (£3,000 in the case of my parents). Solicitors can do mis-selling just as well as IFAs can unfortunately.

If partner lives in the house and is over 60 the value of the house may well be ignored anyway as long as she is living in the home.

If partner doesn't live in the home, so the house is now empty. Then the LA may well investigate if the gifting of the house was done deliberately to avoid paying care fees. If they believe it was this is deliberate deprivation of assets. There is no time limit for how far back they can look for this. The main thing the LA need to prove is that at the time of giving away assets you had a reasonable expectation of needing care in the future and your motivation for giving away assets was to avoid paying for this.

100% this. My mum had to pay for her care home. She had Alzheimer’s. I had to sell her house but was able to afford a lovely care home for her as a result. One that was immaculate, comfortable, well maintained gardens, good food, activities, excellent staff etc.
There are big differences between the quality of care homes and people can live many years in them. I would have felt so guilty if my mum had signed her house over to me but then ended up in some smelly shithole as a result.

This is why advanced directives should exist. I have no interest in living if we can't be independent (pensions etc will cover cleaner + gardener) our house will be in trust to us then DS for hopefully 30 years before we even retire 🤞🏻

No one pays £0 a week.

Everyone pays something even if its just their state pension.

The local authority care homes in my area have the highest standards, are modern and have stable local authority payroll staff teams and are run to provide car not make a profit.

It's the dank, dingy, decrepit private care homes that sink any spare cash into the owners profits and are run on skeleton staff that people end up in if they want the council to pay their fees and there's no space left in the council care homes.

The people who can afford to pay go to homes that the local authority don't contract with as they won't accept our rates of pay.

My grandma's (former council house tenant, no property or sizeable savings) care is funded by the LA and she is in a private care home alongside those who have had to sell their homes to fund it..

Which sounds pretty normal.

But if the house has been given to the son 10 years prior, they won’t be finding anything related to that in bank statements, DWP info etc…
Nor will they they are the owner if a house,

Thats so true. I guess the FA's get paid by the clients plus get commission from the trust so they've got nothing to lose anyway. They couldn't care less if it doesn't work because they've already had their money.

The state will pay and they are making a decision to get state care for the price of leaving assets to their children.

A lot of homes are both state and private funded and you can be in the next room to someone paying 1500 a week with exactly the same service but you are paying £0 per week.

This!

But if you need care and you don't have a house to use to pay for it because you've signed it over to a family trust then how will you pay for the care you need?

Good luck with that. DM left her half of my parent’s house to DB & I with provisions for him to stay there, about 5 years before DF needed care. Social Services tried to say that it was to avoid paying for DF’s care. He had no health issues when they made their wills. DB and I were paying half of the maintenance costs. Admittedly DF told them he owned the house and it was worth about 3 times what it was- he had dementia.

The local authority I work for has a whole team of financial assessors, their only job is to look into the finances of every single person who seeks funding for care from us.

They see this kind of thing every single day and nothing gets past them.

They have a hotline to the DWP to check what benefits someone is claiming and what financial info has been shared with the DWP

They check land registry as a matter of course

They go through bank statements going back 2 - 3 years checking where any large sums of money have gone

I'm not sure how but the other day I heard one establishing that someone had a savings account they hadn't disclosed to them - not sure how they got that information!

Keepin fingers crossed for you, this worked for my relative-then the house was rented out, and the rent generated also couldn’t be touched by the council as it belonged to the trust and not the individual.

Bring on the hate as I couldn’t give a 💩-the care home got every penny of my relative’s not inconsiderable pension income, bar £34 a week, they weren’t getting the house they’d worked all their days for

The 7 years doesn't apply. They can go back as far as they want.

I think the 7 years applies to gifts of money given away before a person's death, when calculating inheritance tax.

Financial advisors seem very keen at the moment to get people in their 60s to put properties in trust to avoid care fees. I don't entirely follow it but feel distrustful

My step dad has done this with his parents house. I knew it wasn't as straight forward as he made out because he then put his and my mums house in his brothers name and paid off the mortgage. My mum believes everything he tells her and thinks she won't have to pay anything if he was to end up in a care home and she can keep the house. I've tried to tell her a million times it's not that easy if it was everyone would be doing it to avoid fees but..

I do not understand the resentment and disgust from some people that elderly people's homes may have to be sold to pay for their care. By the time they are at that point, they can not live in their home independently anyway so they will need to live elsewhere. And as has been explained. the house is not taken into account if their spouse is living in the house.

Care is expensive and who else is supposed to pay for it? You can't expect the state to pay for everyone, and those who do get funding from the state are often put in homes they really would not choose to be in. Beggars can't be choosers.

If you are at the state of needing to be in a home you don't have long left, and you can't take money with you. You may as well use what you have to be in a decent home.

Adult children who care about their parents would rather they were in a comfortable place than worried about their dwindling inheritance. Inheritance is not a right, it is not an entitlement. Until a person has actually died, their assets belong to them and must be used to fund their care.

Does his partner live in the property as her only home? If so the house cannot be sold unless she dies first.

I got this info from Age Concern and one of their many information leaflets you can download from their website, number 39 I think it was but not sure if exact number

It does work !
Depends on how long ago though , it was 7 years.

It’s going to depend on the situation. Did he put the house in a trust alongside his son and if so how long ago? If he very recently just signed the house over then it’s obviously depravation of assets.

You can gift a house but you have to live at least seven years.

Not all LA's dig deep enough but some will go as far as to go further back than seven years to prove you've deliberately got rid of assets.

The thing to do once you're mortgage free is to set up a trust and let the trust own the property, not the people.

It's £250 a night or £10.41 per hour for round the clock care including all meals and bills, pretty good value for money if you ask me

He must really hate his partner leaving her in such a precarious position