can i invest in children's names? and redundancy

raylove

Hi, new to this site!. I'm a housewife (daughter just started school), so until I find a job to fit around the school hours and holidays, we rely heavily on my husbands income. Being in the construction industry, we are well aware things are looking bleak. If he gets made redundant, from what I can gather, we will not receive any kind of benefits because of our savings (around £16,000) - which has been money we've been saving for kids if and when they may go to university, so feel it would be very unfair to make us live of that before we were entitled to anything. Is there a way we could put this money (that is for our children's future) into their names without being penalised?. My husband also works for a company that has never made redundancies, the employeer literally finds a way to sack the invididual, so he's concerned he won't get any benefits because of this. They have literally employed a person to follow the joiners around constantly, trying to catch them out, or cause them great stress until they resign. How underhand and mean?. He's worked for them for 13 years and knows he has nowhere else he could work at the moment, so is keeping his head down (like always), but feels intimidated. How stressful has the world got?.

Reaper

I'm not really qualified to answer your questions but as nobody else has yet I can at least get the ball rolling.

One thing you can do is to put the money in trust for your children. That means it legally becomes theirs although they can't access it until a specified age.

Before doing that you need to make sure :
1) Would that be excluded from your savings when working out the entitlement? I assume so but do check.
2) You have to realise you would lose control of that money. You could not decide to get it back because you need to spend it on something else.

Hopefully somebody will be along soon who can give a more definitive answer.

Lokolo

^^ by the way its called Child Trust Fund.

They cannot access the money until they are 18. There is a thread on the Savings which is stickied.

Otherwise google 'child trust fund' and theres a site which has information on it.

RayWolfe

You may not deliberately deprive yourself of assets and then seek benefits.
..... and quite right too!

Farway

Watch out, this may be seen as, and certainly is, deprivation of assets

The benefits folk are used to all the tricks and methods, it will be considered that you & hubby still have 16k despite giving it to your children

Have you checked the savings limits before benefit is paid? It is around 16K I think, so you may be closer than you think

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1066335

martinman3

Farway wrote: »

Watch out, this may be seen as, and certainly is, deprivation of assets

The benefits folk are used to all the tricks and methods, it will be considered that you & hubby still have 16k despite giving it to your children

Have you checked the savings limits before benefit is paid? It is around 16K I think, so you may be closer than you think

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1066335

Unfortunately you misread that thread.
The limit is £6000 after which money is deducted from the benefits for each £250 you have so that if you have £16000 or more you won't receive any benefits.

martinman3

raylove wrote: »

we will not receive any kind of benefits because of our savings (around £16,000) - which has been money we've been saving for kids if and when they may go to university, so feel it would be very unfair to make us live of that before we were entitled to anything. Is there a way we could put this money (that is for our children's future) into their names without being penalised?.

I commented on a similar thread here where a parent had saved money in trustee accounts for their children, that is the named account holder is the parent but the money belongs to the child. In that case as the money can be safely claimed to be the child's each of the accounts could be changed into the sole name of the child, with obvious loss of control of the accounts by the parent.

In your case you would have problems proving that the money was to be used for their education and not for a new car for example.