Avoid care home fees by divorcing!

[champchomp]

I know this sounds extreme but I’m thinking ahead. DH is a bit older than me and is having some health problems. We have no mortgage and he has a good pension and savings. I’ve seen instances where a spouse has entered a care home and the other one has struggled to pay the fees and had to sell up and use all the savings. Hypothetically speaking would divorcing and splitting assets protect some of the money and property. I know anything could happen between now and if my husband needs care but it worries me and we have children we would like to help financially if need be. I’d always be there for DH no matter what and visa versa. But financially does it make sense to financially separate/divorce if care is needed for either of us?

What is needed is for care homes to stop being allowed to operate as a business.
Care home owners don’t have to declare their profits.
They get tax relief on a set amount of food which means that theyre never going to spend above the taxable allowance on food.
They claim every benefit going on top of your care fees.
There are companies dedicated to advising care home owners how to maximise profits and the staff are paid peanuts.

I was chatting to a care home manager and happened to say every home owner I knew was usually on a cruise. She laughed and said her boss had just left that morning on a cruise .
My df was put in a care home, £2.5 k a week.
He was readmitted to hospital within 24 hours and a week later my dsis went to collect his brand new shaver. It was gone. His room had been pissed in, many of his clothes were missing and nobody cared.

Not for profit care homes should be the norm imo.

yet you don't get cross with the private equity firms fleecing you for far more. How much of your council tax goes on social care, do you know? ( its on hour council tax bill) how much of that ends up in the pockets of private equity firms pockets?

We’ve all worked hard and paid a lot of taxes on our earnings. That’s the price we pay for earning a lot and living in a civilised country.

“Why should I pay for something that poor people get for free?” It’s like saying you want to give all your income to your children, so the state should give you money to pay your mortgage. It’s a nonsense argument. It’s a safety net.

Why do people think it’s fair game to jump through hoops to avoid paying for their care? If someone was working cash in hand, or pretending to be disabled and claiming benefits, people would rightfully be up in arms. Those people are judged as scumbags. Yet somehow others think that it’s absolutely fine, or even sensible, for them to swindle the taxpayer out of much vaster sums, purely on the basis that they want to give their money to their children.

It’s raging hypocrisy.

This. There's a hell of a lot more to it than "changing" them; they're not like small babies who will at least stay where they're put and are reasonably easy to lift, to get in and out of clothes whether they're cooperating or not etc. And the thing about elderly people with dementia is that they tend to have spouses who are also elderly, and not nearly as able as they used to be. Very easy to say "I'd never put him in a home" when you don't know what it's like dealing with dementia, and you don't yet even really understand what it's like to be old.

Some bad advice on this thread.
a) all the “why should I a taxpayer fund your care” or “if you want to protect your assets do your own care” posters clearly have no understanding of caring for someone with dementia and the grotesque lottery we have in this country where someone with cancer gets all the latest drugs and treatments on the nhs and someone with dementia has to sacrifice their life’s work and savings to pay privately for the only option we have to effectively support people with dementia - good quality 24/7 care. I hope you never have to go through it
b) to the poster - divorcing is a terrible idea. You will still have the same assets between you only spread more thinly across two households and you will no longer be protected from IHT. Ultimately if you have to pay for care you have to pay for care but most people don’t need a £1700/week care home even with multiple health problems. It will probably never come to this. The average life span of someone living in a care home is 18 months and not all care homes cost £1700/week. It would depend on your specific needs.
Please get some proper legal advice. My husband and I have just completed mirror wills and set up a flexible life interest trust which protects our half of the assets for our children so at least one half won’t be able to be used for care home fees. We are in our 40s. There are multiple advantages to this besides just care home fees. A good solicitor should be able to advise

No she didn’t. It was actually very sad.

She couldn’t sleep properly because of the light coming in. They couldn’t produce a curtain to replace the other one and they wouldn’t let anyone put up different curtains from elsewhere because of ‘health and safety.’ They would have had to get someone in with a ladder apparently snd the curtains had to be fire safe.

The cups were those big, thick,white mugs. Sue had had proper china and she hated those mugs. You are right, maybe it wasn’t every single mug but it was definitely a lot of them.
Unfortunately she died distressed. Her last year was an unhappy one and although my mum is in good health it put the wind up her and she is very sure that she will be in control of where she lives should she need care. My own mother was quite traumatised by it because she was just totally powerless to so anything as she was just her neighbour. She had a son but he couldn’t give a hoot. He had the money and he was not willing to spend any of Sue’s money on Sue.

Why should you pay for care home? As no one is going to give personal care for free? WTH

But the cost of running the home and paying the staff are the same regardless of who pays. Bulk discounts still have to be subsidised.

For many of us ‘boomers’ the feeling is we scrimped to buy, when others, earning as much or more, chose not to. I was a working mum in the 1970s, when after renting privately, we bought a house in a mining village. Most of the mums I met at school didn’t work, their husbands earned more than mine, and they had subsidised housing.

Their disposable income was greater, their social lives busier, their cars were better, and their holidays more exotic. Now in our later years, our frugality has come back to bite us should we need to move into expensive care homes. It does feels unfair and I understand the OP’s feelings. We own our very modest home as tenants in common, that is half each, to hopefully have a little left at the end. At almost 80, and still living independently, we hope not to need care, but who knows!

Good post @Lindorballs

This is what friends of mine have been advised - though it does mean when one spouse dies it becomes liable for inheritance tax as it is no longer a shared marital asset, so it only works for estates under the value of £325k (or what ever the IHT threshold is).

How do you know how long your mother will need the care honey for?

I can't believe that even after its been pointed out multiple times that the property is mandatorily disregarded if the spouse/partner lives in it, people are still posting cunning plans of how to avoid what wouldn't and couldn't happen anyway

Care homes are not compulsory. Look after him yourself if you want to save the money.

There is so much misinformation on the thread. I am beginning to wonder if the OP was just a wind up.

I think you’re choosing a memory that isn’t the whole picture. Britain in the late 70/early 80s was miserable- high unemployment, and your life largely determined by the location of your birth.

normal people were thrilled- thrilled- to finally have access to financing to buy their own property. Normal people who had seen everyone around them pay rent all their lives and die with nothing vs 25 years of repayment and a lifetimes enjoying the investment. You are being disingenuous

£1700 a week is approx £10 an hour. For 24/7 care, food, laundry, heating, lighting, building insurance, staff insurance, maintenance, council tax, gardeners, water rates, training etc etc. I paid more than that in nursery fees 20 years ago!
We all know the rules, if you want to avoid fees then spend and drip feed your money away much much sooner and take your chances.

Here’s a thought…. My dear mum is now in a care home self funded. She was a school teaching assistant and my dear dad (a factory worker). They scrimped and scraped to buy an x council house. I have had to make sure my mum gets the best possible care in her final years and that meant selling her house to pay for it and using any little bit of savings she had. It’s £75k a year. I have no pension and no inheritance coming my way. It will all go on my mum. The way I see it is it’s HER MONEY. It’s not mine and I would rather she gets the care she needs in a decent care home. Maybe OP you should think about that instead of letting others pay for it through their taxes!

Again, i can only speak from my experience which is having worked in care homes, having owned a care agency and having had family members that were la funded and others that self funded.

Main difference is choice. When you self fund you go round the homes and see which you like. My relative that had no money had a choice of one. The one the la would pay for.

Generally but not always I saw a difference in how service users were treated. There are good homes and bad homes, good staff and bad staff, in all. Im only speaking on what I personally saw. If you paid for your own care you were treated like a customer. If the la pad for you, you weren't.

Not in all places but enough that I personally noticed a pattern. There are a lot of kind and caring people in the care sector but there is also a culture of you get what you pay for

Decor. I saw a difference. The more money going into a place, the better it looked.

Agency staff. Some homes only cared about a warm body to make sure they had the ratios right on paper. As cheap as possible. Other homes made sure the staff filling in had the skills needed.

Everything I saw told me it all came down to money and those who had it had more and better options.

If you were initially self funding then went doen to part then went below the cont levels then you'd think the la would pay to keep you where you were but no, I saw many people being made to move to a cheaper place, which caused them great distress.

Granted, my experience is now 20 years out of date but nothing I read, see or hear fills me with confidence that anything has changed.

I find this mindset interesting, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t be thinking in the same way.

But it’s odd how we work all our lives, save for our future, and then when our future care needs exceed what we’re willing to spend, we don’t want to use our assets (which are no good to us once we’re dead) to continue self funding a comfortable life for ourselves.

It’s important to remember that OP resents that her husband will possibly receive the same level of care as a state funded resident.

You are very naive if you think that you will get the same level of care as people who are fully funded by the Council.

I work for Adult Social Care. If someone is fully funded then there's a limit on how much we will pay for their fees. They don't get to pick and choose the care home. The posh home with nice, modern facilities, loads of staff, activities etc is out of reach.

By all means, hide your assets so you don't have to pay (though we will find out and charge you) but don't expect five star care for Council prices...

This. Councils won’t fund care home fees unless it’s a dire situation. 🤷‍♀️

So you want those who have no savings, a large mortgage and no pension to pay for your DH then. What is wrong with people like you? No wonder the UK is in such a mess with this level of selfishness.

Exactly, if OP divorced it would consume her DH 50%, if she does not, assuming he goes through care first then nothing can be taken from the house as its an automatic disregard.

And that also means no charge made against it, its completely disregarded.

So many people are totally unaware of the rules, even though it can all be summarised in one side of A4

Again, i can only speak from my experience which is having worked in care homes, having owned a care agency and having had family members that were la funded and others that self funded.

Main difference is choice. When you self fund you go round the homes and see which you like. My relative that had no money had a choice of one. The one the la would pay for.

Generally but not always I saw a difference in how service users were treated. There are good homes and bad homes, good staff and bad staff, in all. Im only speaking on what I personally saw. If you paid for your own care you were seen as a customer. If the la pad for you, you weren't.

Not in all places but enough that I personally noticed a pattern. Management were the worst. There are a lot of kind and caring people in the care sector but there is also a culture of you get what you pay for.

Care staff feeling demoralised, undervalued and frustrated. Low wages failing to attract good staff.

Decor. I saw a difference. The more money going into a place, the better it looked.

Agency staff. Some homes only cared about a warm body to make sure they had the ratios right on paper. As cheap as possible. Other homes made sure the staff filling in had the skills needed.

i could go on all day. Everything I saw told me it all came down to money and those who had it had more and better options.

If you were initially self funding then went down to part then went below the cont levels then you'd think the la would pay to keep you where you were but no, I saw many people being made to move to a cheaper place, which caused them great distress. Not always, sometimes they'd stay. Normally if they had family kicking up an almighty fuss.

Granted, my experience is now 20 years out of date but nothing I read, see or hear fills me with confidence that anything has changed. If anything, I expect its worse.