Putting home into family trust to avoid nursing home fees

Bully for your parents, OP. Do you think other people are given their houses?

My parents bought the house in which we grew up, he was self-funding in a residential home, paying from pensions and capital.

He didn't ask anyone else to pay for him. If I need to go into a home I won't ask anyone else to pay.

And I don't want to pay for you.

Speaking as the daughter of a war hero and the stepdaughter of another whose mother sat on the dockside in the freezing cold and rain mending anti submarine nets and whose aunt worked in a munitions factory. I know ALL of them would be humiliated expecting the state to pay for their care because their relatives wouldn't look after them, when they were perfectly able to pay for it themselves, which two of them did.
It's called accepting responsibility.

Veryannoyed wrote: »

I'm not sure how we own the property at the moment but like McKneff I have also heard of being tenants in common and this sounds like a suitable option.

No it isn't. It's a legal minefield.

If half the house is owned by the children then that half is part of their assets. The house could be subject to a forced sale if one became bankrupt, and it counts towards their assets if one divorces. If they don't live there then the children pay capital gains tax on their share when the house is eventually sold. If the spouse who still owns half goes into a home and the house isn't sold at that point then the council simply place a legal charge on the property for the care fees they've paid, and recover the money from the proceeds of sale when the house is eventually sold. Meanwhile the children have to maintain an empty house ....... or if one of them lives in it then they either have to pay rent to the parent in the care home who who owns half the house, which the council will use to pay the care fees, or the council will simply assume that rent is being paid and stop paying a portion of the fees to the home that is equal to the "notional" rent and if you don't like it they'll let you take them to court - where they'd probably win.

And those are just the obvious pitfalls .......

Ther really isn't an effective way of the last remaining spouse avoiding the sale of the home to pay care fees. If there was an effective method then the government would legislate to stop it - but they haven't done because a foolproof method doesn't exist.

Apart from that, less than one in ten homeowners end up in care homes anyway, so it is daft to deprive yourself of ownership of your home when there's at least a 90% chance you'll live in it until you die.

Oldernotwiser wrote: »

No Family Allowance, no state pension, no Attendance Allowance?

Pretty unusual, I think.

Or NHS, or free bus pass or education.....

Paying taxes isn't about getting the money returned to you in cash. It's about using the services that taxes pay for.