Mother was wrong. Social services are devils!

Mojisola

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=44823688
"By the time she went into the home, we were employing a gardener and a 'domestic help' as neither of us was capable of running the house physically.

My mother, had she remained compos mentis, would have continued to pay for everything to run the house and to look after me until the day she died when, doubtless, I would sell the house and find a more suitable property for my needs. The house is anything but suitable - I can't get upstairs for a start!"

Dramatist - I can see how you've got yourself in this situation and it sounds as if you have been badly advised but, once your Mother went into a home, her money should have been spend on her, not on things that only benefited you.

You really need to get some good advice about how you are going to manage financially for the rest of your life as you may not have much of an inheritance coming to you.

charlieboycat

thenudeone wrote: »

Once the EPA is invoked then by definition your mother is no longer capable of making responsible decisions herself.

This may be the case with LPAs (I don't know) but it is not the case with EPAs. An Attorney can use the EPA while the Donor is compos mentis. Should the Donor become incapable of making decisions (eg. dementia) then at that point the Attorney has a legal obligation to register the EPA with the Court of Protection. It would seem in this case that the OP has ignored that legal obligation as well as the more fundamental ones of only spending to benefit the Donor and basic record keeping.

thenudeone

charlieboycat wrote: »

An Attorney can use the EPA while the Donor is compos mentis. Should the Donor become incapable of making decisions (eg. dementia) then at that point the Attorney has a legal obligation to register the EPA with the Court of Protection.

Thanks for that correction. Although since the OPs mother has dementia I had assumed that it had been duly registered because of that situation.

charlieboycat

thenudeone wrote: »

... I had assumed that it had been duly registered because of that situation.

I had deduced from the tone of the OP's original posts that he is now being hauled up before the Court of Protection because Social Services have reported a perceived abuse of the EPA. Had the EPA been registered with the CoP in 2007 with the onset of dementia then one would have expected the CoP to have intervened somewhat earlier - even if only to approve the nature of the expenditure and to require proper record keeping.

Dramatist

The above replies are all very worrying. EPA law says:The actual wording of the 1985 EPA act is:

(4) Subject to any conditions or restrictions contained in the instrument, an attorney under an enduring power, whether general or limited, may (without obtaining any consent) act under the power so as to benefit himself or other persons than the donor to the following extent but no further, that is to say: (a) He may so act in relation to himself or in relation to any other person if the donor might be expected to provide for his or that person's needs respectively; and (b) He may do whatever the donor might be expected to do to meet those needs.
This I have followed to the letter as mother wished. As soon as I enacted the EPA I went to an IFA who told me that all I was doing was correct and all I needed to keep as accounts were the bank statements. This too i have done. All mother's shares rtc were lodged with th IFA who sold them as needed although I hasve since alarmingly been told by a friend that I shouldn't have sold ANY shares as the dividends would have covered the shortfall in the nursing home fees and mother would still have all her capital for me to inherit when she dies. This the IFA never mentioned. he just kept selling shares and charging me £225 a time per £5000 worth. This, my friend says was daylight robbery - but how was I to know?

Mother was indeed a senior accountant and told me that discussing money or watching other peope deal with it was very wrong. Not only did she not show me what she did, she would turn over the paperwork she was doing if I came into the room and, when she finished she would lock her books in the safe and hide the key It took me months to find it after she ent into the home and, when I did, I discovered that the secret books were just crazy lists of every damn thing she had ever bought and how much it cost and when she had bought it. Interesting historically but no damn use to anybody else!

I mustn't go on, i'm getting upset again about it all!

thenudeone

Dramatist wrote: »

All mother's shares rtc were lodged with th IFA who sold them as needed although I hasve since alarmingly been told by a friend that I shouldn't have sold ANY shares as the dividends would have covered the shortfall in the nursing home fees and mother would still have all her capital for me to inherit when she dies.

I would be wary of taking advice from your friend.

There is no specific obligation for you to buy or keep assets that provide an income; just an obligation to act prudently and keep records.

If you had to sell the shares to provide income for your mother to live on then there's no problem. The dividend from those shares would only have provided a fraction of the funds released from sale.

It is certainly not in your mother's interests to keep the shares so that she can pass on an inheritence after she dies, if the only means of doing so is for her to live in poverty for the rest of her life.