AIBU to be confused about care home fees and savings?

[Ishoos]

Need the help of the hive mind on this please as my tiny mind is blown!

PIL own a property and have some savings, it’s unmanageable, so plan is to sell and then move into a retirement apartment.

Option 1: buy the apartment outright
Option 2: use the property sale funds to rent over time

What happens if in a few years one of them needs to go into a care home leaving the other in the apartment? PiL have minimal pension coming in each month so rent will come from savings/ property sale

Option 1: I understand that the council would let the remaining person live in the property and use any savings above the £23k to fund the care home and then council would fund? Problem with this is that apparently the apartments are difficult to sell on and the retirement company take a cut.

Option 2: council would fund the care home from the savings, until they reached £23k threshold? Potentially this would leave the remaining parent in law without savings to continue to pay the rent as pension is small?

What am I missing? What should they do?

Voting options:

IABU - it’s straightforward and I’m being a numpty!

IANBU - yup, you’re all stumped too!

Without going into the specifics of care home fees, there's almost never an economic situation where it makes sense to rent if you have the capital freely available to buy. The economy has to be booming in a weird way for you to get a better return on your money investing it elsewhere after accounting for the amount you spend on rent. It basically only happens in a situation where theres excess housing so its absurdly cheap, which is just not going to happen in anyone's lifetime in the uk.

TBH it is a fraught and complicated area - I say this from rather bitter experience.

My best advice would be to get onto an organisation like Age UK as they have specialist advisers in this sort of thing, as each situation is different.

On one point, once the 23,000 threshold is reached, the Local Authority will only fund a certain amount until a lower threshold is reached - think it's around 13,000, and only then would full funding kick in.

Thank you for your help