Fed up of reading threads asking how they can get out of paying care home fees.

[Nextdoortomeis]

As per the title.
I'm sure lots of people would like the state to pay care home fees.
But we don't live in a fair world.
Both mum and mil paid nearly £70k in fees
yes I didn't want to pay but I also wanted them to get the best care in their later years.

What happens is that the LA treat you as though the money were still in your bank account and bill you accordingly.

I don't know about Biker47, but I'm planning for a bottle of whisky and a very cold night. Let's hope I'll still be able to get myself outside!

You do realise that people can work like dogs their whole life and make sacrifices for decades just to get by. My parents could never have afforded a property despite always working. They and generations before them lived in rented/social housing. Just becuase someone hadn’t had the privilege to amass a substantial estate does not make them scroungers and they haven’t “pissed their money up the wall” as mentioned by a previous poster.

But if you have cancer and finish up in a nursing home then you DO have to pay, unless you fulfill all the very stringent criteria for CHCF.

Bill who, a dementia patient?

Then you will have no choice should you need care. Being able to pay will get you a better quality of life.

@Vinvertebrate - it's not 7 years for deprivation of assets

If the asset was sold off year’s ago then what?

If that adult child is regarded as vulnerable in some way - e.g. disabled - then they can remain. Otherwise they cannot, as the house will need to be sold to cover care costs.
A resident vulnerable or elderly resident can stay.

I intend to transfer my assets to my kids while I'm still young and don't require care. Why wait?

Absolutely disagree. There has been nothing financially astute about the fact that our house is now worth ten times what we paid for it a quarter of a century ago. That has been nothing but undiluted luck. All it would have taken would have been a little bit of bad luck for us to have lost the house long ago and ended up living in rented accommodation instead.

Take good advice on that. You don't want to find yourself evicted by your children and their partners.

Will you really care that much about having fancier facilities when you're ill enough to need care?

But the point is, if the care was adequate, and being administered by qualified people, then it might not be as much of an issue. There are so many very poorly run care homes, where our elderly are 'cared' for by uneducated people who have not chosen to the job as a vocational thing, but because its one of the very few jobs they can get with little or no qualifications. I'd like to see huge improvements in training and better pay to attract better staff.

You know last night I was thinking I want to know who the local smack dealer is, so I can say goodbye to my children and give myself a lovely jab into oblivion if the alternative is dementia.

I agree in principle but that depends what is wrong with the ageing relative. There are some folk who require 24 hour supervision.

Why wait?

Well here's a scenario - your home and all your savings now belong to your children. They grow up and marry and fall on hard times and their spouses (people you do not know right now) might pressure them into realising their share for the benefit of their new family. Or they might divorce and assessments of assets for alimony purposes will see that you have a stash of cash and act accordingly. It is all fraught with possible problems.

I can't believe posters don't think about what could go wrong transferring assets. If it was so simple everyone would do it.

Hopefully you'll go quick then. Personally I'd have wanted my parents to have the best care and nicest surroundings rather than a legacy.

As it happened they had shitty deaths in hospital.

My dad’s care cost hundreds of thousands of pounds when I was in my 20s and he had early onset Alzheimer’s. When the fancy hotel style care home decided when he started behaving strangely that he was too much trouble, he was forcefully moved to a “shit” home. The second home was staffed by kind, hard working and attentive staff who kept us up to date with what was happening with him. I myself have a degenerative neurological disease, I am not on benefits of any kind. Whilst I am happy to pay, the fees are too much and I will need it from too early and for too long, I will likely be choosing to make my exit before then. I haven’t been able to earn like my dad did, I don’t want family or strangers money to pay for me, when it could help my children.

Yes, that's much better expressed than my post! I'd like to see all the governments of the world working together to ensure that multinational companies pay a fair whack towards the cost of public services too, but that's never going to happen, certainly not while Putin and Trump are still drawing breath.

It's extremely overpriced

I thought you could not stay living in transferred assets

I was fine with my Dad offering up his house to pay. But I did get hacked off with private funders having to pay extra to support the lack of council funds supplied by the council for those who couldn't pay.🙄

Luckily, I got NHS continuing funding care paid, for him, so it ceased to be a problem after a while.

The unfairness is that someone who lives frugally and saves some money has to spend it on care home fees. Someone on exactly the same income who blows it all on fancy clothes, endless cruises, expensive restaurants, new kitchens everytime the fashion changes, gets their care funded by the taxpayer. Fair?