Fees/selling house question

[Wallawallakoala]

Sorry if this sounds stupid and I also don’t want to come across as selfish this is not my intention but please can someone help…

My DM has dementia and if/when she goes into a care home will she need to sell her house to be able to cover costs?

it sounds selfish but it’s my childhood home and either myself or my sister would ideally like to keep the house in the family.

Is there any way at all of doing this and covering the costs of a care home if needed? (DF passed over 30 years ago so DM lives alone). What are the options in this scenario?

I hope that makes sense, trying to figure out a lot at the moment!

You can pay for her care any way you like however, the council won’t cover it if she has assets (which us when it would become necessary to sell her house).

As a pp said you can use other funds you don't have to sell the house.

Thank you so much for responding.

If it becomes necessary to sell the house, could that be bought by family members? I’ve had a look into this and i understand we would need to speak to a solicitor to make sure everything was above board especially because of inheritance tax etc.

Yes family members can buy the house. They can't do it to put it in their name instead of your mums name to avoid care home fees though.

Of course family members can buy it but will need to be market value

Thank you, sorry these may be really obvious things just trying to get my head round it all.

Care home costs will be in the region of £1000-2000+/week depending on your area and her needs. Does she have any other way of paying for these? Savings?

Occasionally it can work to rent out the house to help towards care fees, but given nursing home fee costs now, this would only work if your mum had quite significant savings and a decent pension as well.

Having lost my family home a long time ago - it's ultimately just a house. Your memories are the same whether you can go back there or not.

IHT is not an issue because she’d be selling it (not giving it away). She can’t give it away if the money is required for care home fees because that would be deprivation of assets. I guess you might want to check what normally satisfies the ‘market value’ test. You might just need a few valuations but depending on the type of house, the condition and the location it can be hard to accurately value some properties. Obviously you don’t want to pay over the odds but equally you need to be sure the council aren’t going to come after you. This would only happen if the money ran out and they think you paid less for the house than you should have (ie they have to start paying sooner than they otherwise would have). In reality this is unlikely, most people don’t live in care homes for long enough to use up hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees.

That’s actually really helpful thank you. I actually had that thought that despite her savings or however we fund it,
it’s possible that she wouldn’t be in it long enough for it to get to that. I guess we will see!