Heartbroken that I'm being forced to sell mum's house, she worked hard for it and paid her national insurance

[Jkoakham]

And now her savings are running out I will need to sell her house to carry on funding it.

It all seems to very unfair, her house was supposed to be passed to me but instead it's affectively passed to government and private companies.

I thought the dimentia tax had been can cancelled?

The thing that many people don’t seem to understand is that the quality of purely state funded care is atrocious. I would spend every penny of my “inheritance” to ensure that my parents can live comfortably in the best care home possible I'm unsure which county you're in but I've never found this to be the case (I manage a care home). Every care home I've dealt with have a mix of funded and self funded residents. The carers shouldn't know who is funded how to ensure quality. The only difference is funded residents have social worker involvement. Oh and self funders may get a slightly bigger room.

Thanks @scaryteacher. I think, given the option, I'd rather defer it until I die so I can be more comfortable when I'm alive! Downsizing won't be an option (unless I live in a tent) and I'd be reluctant to do an equity release after seeing the poor return my DM got. We've also got a short lease so, although it will see me out, the property isn't worth anywhere near what it could be.

The essential problem is too many people, living to too great an age. I think we will have no choice but to bring in euthanasia for people over a certain age-roll on 50 years and the population will be so top heavy with aged people requiring care it will be completely unsustainable in its current format. My mum is a carer in a very good home (she’s 63!) and there are very few ethnic minority clients-so many of them must live to an old age, particularly if they are veggie and sober. It’s a thought that they must all be being cared for by their families at home.

There is no reason why your mum shouldn’t pay her living costs though - accommodation, laundry, food etc. You’re not suggesting the NHS should pay that element are you?

Where are the LA homes... I think they are rare as Hen's teeth....as I said before self funding does not nean 'better' care....the company I work for made 2 billion in profit last year and are hopingbthe UK government continue to privatise mental health care ( for example,) as they will be quids in. In my experience someone paying £1200 to £1500 a week receives the same nursing care as someone funded by local authority etc.

If you want to inherit the house then you need to care for your mother yourself. Otw, you have to pay someone else to do it.

That's how it is and you must have known that her savings would only last so long.

That's the system. There isn't enough money available to pay for a growing elderly population who are also living longer.

NI contributions and pensions over a person's working life when invested well only cover about 10 years worth of a pension. The rest is being paid by current workers. This is what the pensions crisis is and it will only get worse with increasing life expectancy. Included in this is the added burden on medical services and who pays for it,

You'll have to look after your own family if you want the house. Seems fair to me. That is what we are doing.

When the NHS began nobody envisaged us all living longer. Unfortunately many of us aren't living better. We are old at 55 and just get more dependent and more expensive from there on in. It is encumbant on all of us to still be young at 65.

A seminar I attended years ago left me with one piece of understanding; you are the old person you think old people are. If you think 60 is elderly you will be elderly at 60. If you think 60 year olds are vital and dynamic people you will be the same.

This issue highlights a large scale societal problem. Many people do not understand that whilst the NHS is free at the point of use and paid for out of general taxation, social care is means tested and those that do receive free social care are the few with very severe needs. This reflects the fact that local authority funding has been cut hugely over the last 10 years. So when you feel passionate about the future of the NHS you should equally be concerned about the proper funding of social care - which inevitably would require us paying additional income tax and National Insurance if it were to be properly funded.

Others have rightly advised you to get advice on whether she might qualify for Continuing Health care funding - this is quite limited and not automatic. If you want avoid selling the house you could apply for a defered payment scheme if your local authority provides it or take out an equity release scheme. Both mean that they pay the price of your Mums care now and then take the balance out of the sale of the house. Seek independent financial advice or call the Independent Age helpline or Age UK helpline for free impartial advice.

Ultimately if your Mum is in a care home, has high level care needs or dementia the cost of her care could be very significant dependent on how long she might need it.

Another general misunderstanding is that the NI/tax you pay in throughout your life is kept in a pot for you later in life to draw down. In reality, each working generation is paying for the care of those currently old. So as the population ages and the proportion of the working age declines the tax burden increases on those who are working increases. So the real question is how much are we prepared to tax everyone now working (including those struggling with student debt and unable to get on the housing ladder) to pay for your Mum's care, so you can keep the house. If we over tax the current working generation then their capacity to care for themselves when they are old will also decrease.

These are challenging questions. Should social care be free like the NHS and if so how much tax are we all prepared to pay for both?

Nursing care is provided free of charge by the nhs - it takes place in the form of visits at home and the minimum someone needs to survive is funded. Housework, laundry, food shopping etc does not come under nursing care so has to be paid for.

When you move a loved one into a nursing home you are paying for a nurse to be available 24 hours a day, housekeeping to be available 24 hours a day, food, toiletries, utility bills, rent, medicine, etc.

To provide 1 nurse 24 hours a day in a home, 5 full time nurses are needed. At an average of £30k a year salary, this costs £2800 a week alone, if the ratio is 1:10 for registered nurses then that costs £1204 a month per patient residing in a nursing home. If you add in a care assistant or 2 that could add on another £100-£400 a month per patient. Then a doctor will also be required for 20 hours a week at another cost of £25k a year, or another £200 a month per patient. And of course these staff need training, sick pay, pensions etc. So £1800 a month of the bill AT LEAST is just to cover healthcare staff.

Very few nursing home patients truly require 6.5 hours a day direct contact with a nurse or healthcare assistant and 2 hours a week contact with a doctor. That is what you are paying a premium for. Once you add in all of the additional costs of housing etc the fees make sense.

I'm not sure everyone here has a true insight into how utterly shit care homes are. Even the seemingly posh looking ones. Many care staff don't give a shit about their patients, they say pay peanuts get monkeys. There's some awful carers that are at best ignorant and worst deliberately abusive. I do not, and would never, consider a care 'home' a home. They are institutions where the elderly are shoved until they die. And most elderly would rather be with family but can't, or they are too far gone with dementia to know. In which case they often pace the corridors or sit asking when they can go home. It's utterly shit, I know it needs paying for. However if the care was decent, if elderly people were looked after properly, felt safe, and it was actually home rather than a room they are given to put the stuff left from having to give up their actual real home, then it would be different.
And it doesn't make a bit of difference if it's a home on a council estate or one with private grounds. Abuse in care happens everywhere and you can't be vigilant enough, especially when your family know you can't cope with them or feel you're a burden-there are people who would rather have the house than the old dear-or if they are too demented to say anything.
Too many times have I heard a carer call an 85 year old 'cute', routine toilet times and left to piss in pads the rest of the time, eat what there is or nothing, those who need feeding given Weetabix instead of a proper meal, and so on. No way should that be someone's 'home'.

My father spend £130,000 on full time day and night dementia care in his own house our parents had owned for 50 years and they both died in the house. He died just as his life savings were exhausted and had worked for the NHS all his life. I am glad he was able to die at home as he felt secure there and it was familiar to him. I would like to die at home too. Our mother died in the house too (before our father).

As for who should pay what that is never easy to decide. Many people don't need older age care so it's a bit pot luck and some of us don't live long - my parents didn't even make 80.

I've told my parents that they must spend every penny of their savings and equity on whatever they need for themselves in their old age. I don't want a large lump sum inheritance if it means that they don't put the heating on or end up in a miserable care home

I agree with you OP that it's shit but the response isn't to demand repayment of ni but to call for more collective sharing of risk - ie more tax.

The lowest 10% of households have average wealth assets of £12,600 (but that's with a spread going down to the very poorest 1% having overall negative wealth (debt) of £4,434.

Here's a graph showing centile of population (x axis) and household wealth.

Only a relatively small fraction of the oldest people need to live in nursing care for an extended period. If you are unlucky enough to be one of these, your wealth gets reduced down to the same £23,250 regardless of what you saved in the first place. The person who saved £25,000 pays £1,750 and ends up with the same amount as the person who saved £50,000 and has to contribute £26,750. No sliding scale.

I don't know what the answer is. Neither of my parents inherited anything from their parents. Both sets of grandparents owned their own homes, but they had to be sold to fund care home fees.

My siblings and I may one day inherit a half share of my father and stepmother's house (though we may see none of it as when my father died the money went into trust in case it was needed by my stepmother who is in a care home as she is blind and has dementia).

My husband will inherit from his aunt, who recently died after living in a dementia care home for a couple of years. My husband had power of attorney and let her house off to help pay the fees, but obviously it covered only a small proportion of them. Her estate was divided between him and his mother (aunt's sister) and as she is also in a care home, much of that half will probably be used up on fees. Currently his mother is funded by the council, as her assets are under the limit, but that will all change once her sister's money comes through.

Ultimately what we inherit, or not, comes down to a variety of factors, including our families' wealth, health, size, and luck. Sometimes this includes the order in which people die, but there is no point in our bewailing the fact that my husband would have inherited more if his mother had died before his aunt, or if his aunt hadn't had dementia and could have remained in her own home.

As others have said, paying for care has given us/our relatives choice. But one thing that surprised us was the huge discrepancy in care home fees. My mother in law and step mother are both in lovely homes, which are comparatively cheap (they are in two different areas and are both well below £1000 a week). One is family run, the other run by a local charity. The one my mother in law is in (paid for by the council) is much nicer and much cheaper than the one we paid for her to stay in previously (short term respite) so we feel very lucky.

Sorry pressed post by accident half way through...

Meanwhile where you manage to pop your clogs with a short illness requiring no nursing care you get to keep the lot, and a scandalously low only 7% of estates pay any inheritance tax at all.

So we have an unlucky few having their life savings destroyed abd far too many comfortable mid-wealth people getting off scot-free.

To stop other families from suffering what you are bearing, risk needs to be pooled.

With suitable safeguards to stop home-owners avoiding it by divesting themselves of property as they get older, something like an automatic percentage of the value of the house being due to the state when the owner dies. That pool of wealth then goes to funding the nursing care of the unlucky few who need it - and also to paying off the debts and creating a minimum estate value for that poorest 10%

There are hardly any LA care homes - most were sold off a long time ago and I would never recommend anyone going into one - they are not generally of good quality. The best care homes are those high end privately run (think very expensive - you get what you pay for) or ones run by charities or not for profits.

For those qualifying LA's pay a set level of fees (on a scale) to the care home. Many famillies end up paying 'top up fees' to secure a better quality home than the LA's fees will pay for.

There is alot of guidance out there on how to choose a care home (the status of the provider is not usually a relevant factor). Generally look for a home rated good or excellent and which offers person centred care where they care about the person not their prescriptions.

VladmirsPoutine they don't. They have it funded by the local authority (although their state pensions are taken and they are just given a small allowance for day to day expenses).

The only advantage of funding yourself is that you (and your family) have some choice as to which home you go into - if you are funded by the LA, they will choose which home you go to.

I couldn't care less about any potential inheritance. I do find it illogical that if people have certain illnesses such as cancer or heart disease their care is funded by the NHS, whereas if they have Alzheimer's or dementia they may have to fund themselves. I also find it unfair that self-funders in some care homes subsidise those paid for by the LA.

I am fed up reading how all these elderly people with their own homes have "worked hard all their lives" to pay for them. I'm sure it's true in many cases but it really isn't in many. Very often they have simply benefited from the rise in house values. There is going to be quite a distortion in society between those inheriting and often paying no tax on inheritance and those who do not get large amounts of free money

I agree davros. I imagine that those who are in work for 5am to clean buses aren't exactly dossers

Why can't NI cover care costs if you've paid it all your working life? It's not as if anyone is going to live to 110 is it? You work for far longer than you're old. There are millions of people working here.

I don't blame you for feeling the way you do OP. It must be sad to cope with your mother being ill, knowing she worked and paid her dues, and now the home she worked for has to go.

I shouldn't think anybody would be happy in your shoes but as ever on this particular board schadenfreude rules the day.

Mistress - because NI covers lots of things over someone's life, and elderly care is very expensive

It all seems to very unfair, her house was supposed to be passed to me but instead it's affectively passed to government and private companies

So basically, your mother can’t live in one home and needs to move to another home, and needs to sell her former place of residence in order to afford to live where she needs to live?

I tell you what - I’ve moved across the country recently for a job. Will you pay for my house in my new town of residence, so I can keep my other house. Because clearly it’s just not fair that I have to sell one home in order to fund where I’m living now. Someone should pay for me to keep both homes.

YABU. Why are you expecting other tax payers to pay for you to inherit your mother’s house? If she can’t live in it, and needs to live elsewhere, why is it so unfair that she needs to sell one home to fund living in another?

And why are you expecting me to fund your inheritance?

There are hardly any LA care homes - most were sold off a long time ago and I would never recommend anyone going into one I know of a good one.

My parents are insistent that my sister and I will inherit as much as possible. My dad doesn’t want everything he has worked hard for going to a greedy and pointless government.