Residential care home fees, would I be unreasonable to ask how much they are ?

[frumpety]

I have tried to find out online, but the average figures quoted seem a lot lower than the rates at local residential care homes ? Also there doesn't seem to be any info on prices on any of the home websites ? why is this ?

@TitusOatesLivesNextDoor
Good luck sorting that out.

My mum's was £6k a month. Nursing care (in the sense she needed hoisting and toileting care etc after her stroke, but wasn't actually ill). And the home had its own nurses.

Now she's in an extra care flat with carers coming in for or five times a day. That was supposed to be cheaper but it's not worked out that way.

I'm up North. The local warden assisted place is just under a thousand pounds a week, warden on site, no personal care. Its in an inner city area and its half empty. The residents all look impoverished.

I work in social care in quite a deprived Northern area, is £600-700 pw here.

If you are looking for something, I totally echo the comments about not picking based on which has nice curtains. Some of my favourite homes look a bit shabby. Much more important to ask how long staff and manager have been there. High staff/manager turn over suggests things aren't great. Check cqc report. Visit more then once and unannounced, you probably wouldn't buy a house on one visit, don't pick a care home any quicker. Remember even if you are not eligible for council funding you are still entitled to advice and support (although you might be in quite a waiting list)

DW’s grandmother is in one I. The north west that costs £2300 a week

North West fees around £1000 a week for nursing care for my Dad who died recently - the last couple of months we didn’t contribute as were CHC funded previous to that CHC funding contributed to the nursing care element and he paid the rest out of his pension and savings
Rest of us paid third party top up to nursing home direct as he wasn’t allowed to pay it himself
It was worth it they were wonderful and cared for him well and with love

It depends on the type of room

Not always. When we were looking around for my mother, costs seemed to be more or less the same regardless of the room. We found somewhere with a pleasant, reasonably large room and an en-suite for the same price that other places are charging for smaller rooms with no en suite. It's still very, very expensive but at least there's peace of mind for us in knowing she's somewhere comfortable where the care standards seem reasonably high.

Please excuse my ignorance.

For how many years have people had to find their own care home fees? Is this a new thing? I honestly thought that you could go private or you could have LA-funded care homes?

Park head..yes we were very lucky
All the care homes in our area are all pretty much of a muchness , so I wasn’t aware of any that charged more
I didn’t have an ss assessment for my aunt and she still paid only £475 per week.

Mum slipped down the pecking order and thus qualified for chc
The care home wanted her out of there as she was very confrontational (😢..my lovely sweet mum)
All of them in our town were full, so I was given free rein to choose, and I chose one in the next town. It had to be in a nursing home.
I don’t know how much that cost but I suspect more
There were mental health nurses in charge and they were able to calm her down considerably
She received 8 months free care before she passed away

Tippexy..the rules haven’t changed since the social care act of 1946
Everyone always paid if they had assets, And didn’t qualify for chc but the majority people did not have assets until council homes were sold off under margaret that her and people began to acquire assets.

People think the rules have changed
They haven’t

My mum pays about 5k a month (Midlands, self-funded). This covers accommodation, food and essentially personal care, such as toileting, dressing and washing. It doesn't include chiropody, haircuts etc.

£3,500 a month for a nursing home I know, for someone who needs full nursing care. She can’t get out of bed.

@ParkheadParadise I never did work out what the £200 a week extra we paid was for.

same reason as why a single 330ml can of coca cola is 85p at Sainsbury's but if you buy an 8 pack of exactly the same stuff from the same supplier it is only £3.80 so that's 47.5p per 330ml can. It is always cheaper to buy in bulk. the council is the only customer these companies have who can buy in bulk - anyone else is going to choose them a maximum of 1 or 2 times. Obviously the council get a discount.

My mum is in the dementia unit of a Sunrise care home, it's around £900-£950 per week.

I was surprised when looking around to find that a couple of the other homes I looked at which were 'OK' but not as nice were £1,000 per week so slightly more. I didn't ask prices for those which I didn't even consider.

I would definitely recommend the one where my mum is. I think it has been really beneficial for her, they always help her to look nice and there seem to be plenty of activities.

A wise word to all about your own estate.

PUT IT IN TRUST!!!!!!! This is a vital thing to do. And appoint power of attorneys now, two for health and welfare and two for finances.

So important

@debbs77 why do you recommend putting an estate I Trust? Curious as my parents property was separated into trust for the other one when they died. It was meant to be something around inheritance tax but either the threshold has gone up or the advice wasn't correct as it has caused us a lot of confusion around selling our parents property after my father died.

Also if someone is self funding I am not clear to the benefit of the POA for. Health and Welfare. We didn't have one for either of my parents and professionals have always consulted me, asked my views and considered best interests. Even in respect of the DNAR.

Certainly agree regarding Financial POA. Very important.

Putting money in trust doesn't necessarily work. Councils can and do successfully challenge this if they think they can show that a significant reason for putting property into trust was to avoid care costs and, at the time you did it, you had a reasonable expectation that you’d need care in the future..

PUT IT IN TRUST

Think very very carefully before you do.

www.moneywise.co.uk/news/2018-01-22%E2%80%8C%E2%80%8C/legal-warning-over-trusts-promise-beat-care-home-fees

See also recent threads where people with no assets to fund their care find they have no choice in where their care is provided.

appoint power of attorneys now everyone should do this if they can

two for health and welfare and two for finances or one, or three. Appoint whoever you trust most in your life to make decisions on your behalf if you can't.

It was meant to be something around inheritance tax but either the threshold has gone up or the advice wasn't correct What's changed is that any IHT tax-free allowance you don't use can now be used by your spouse. Previously, you could leave it all tax free to your spouse, but when they died they'd have only their personal allowance free of tax, and your allowance couldn't be added to it, even though you hadn't used it if you left everything to your spouse. So instead, the advice was to use your tax free allowance leaving money to a trust and keeping it out of your spouse's estate.

I have a question on this...what if the individual's savings drop below the threshold after the initial assessment? I keep asking this of the L.A but am not getting any clear answers.

Dowser has it spot on. Up until the 80s there were dementia wards in hospitals. They started to be closed down at about the same time Thatcher was encouraging everyone to become a home owner, council tenants given the right-to-buy. Owning your own house means there is something to be sold to pay for your care.

My parents live in a house worth just over £100k. They worked their arses off to drag themselves out of poverty and were so proud to be home-owners. They're not rich baby boomers, no inheritance for them, no gold-plated pension schemes. Their house didn't rocket in value (oop North, working class town).

My dad has dementia, we were quoted £2k a week for a nursing home. Applied for CHC funding but were turned down, he's not bad enough, apparently.

Put it In *trust
*
Do not do that primarily as if you live as your home you will need top pay a commercial rent to the Trust.

Also this may trigger annal tax returns and possible unforeseen tax events. Also what happens when you want to pay for a nice care home and you have no money. There are some "Trust companies" that do those but they are unregulated either

Under new rules brought in from 1 Nov, care home operators have to publish their fees clearly. I'm not going to name the operator I work for on here, but we show the min and max rates on our website so people understand the range - the exact cost will be based on the type of room occupied and the level of care needed.

Self-funders do pay more than the rates paid by local authorities. But that's because the rates the local authorities pay simply don't cover the costs of providing the care - a bit like the 30 hours free childcare! It'll also vary depending on whether you're looking at a for-profit home (Anchor, Four Seasons etc) or a not-for-profit (Anchor Handover, Methodist Homes etc) as the former have to build in trying to make some shareholder profit.

@frumpety if you want to PM me the area you're in, I'll see if I can find anything out for you.

In the SE last year the shockingly bad care home (that I would not have put any family member in) was £950 a week. The decent ones were £1,300-1,400 a week.