Care Home Fees Conundrum

haras_nosirrah

sell the flat and give her back the 70k to fund care or rent the flat out and use it to towards the payments.

This will come under deprivation of assets

Jazzhands

Thanks all for your replies, based on your advice it is clear this will be regarded as deprivation therefore I will be advising the council of this and putting the apartment on the market.

Terry_Towelling

Jazzhands wrote: »

Thanks all for your replies, based on your advice it is clear this will be regarded as deprivation therefore I will be advising the council of this and putting the apartment on the market.

Whether coming clean about the £70K will permanently divert attention away from the £50K gift is unclear, but, depending whose accounts the £50K went through on its travels, you may need to be prepared for that to come under scrutiny when the £70K has run down. Take care.

pensionpawn

I did some research into this area after a discussion with a family member who thought the '7 year rule' applied to care home fees. I discovered that for deprivation of assets to become an issue there must be concrete evidence that the movement of money was with the sole intention of avoiding potential care home costs. From what I've read in this thread I think it would be difficult to argue against the councils claim for the money as in the normal chain of events the sale of one house would fund the purchase of the next and just because the funds went through an intermediary the money still effectively belonged to the mother. That contrasts with grandparents paying their grandsons / granddaughters university fees say 15 years before illness strikes necessitating a care home situation.

peterbaker

We are all suffering from a condition, aren't we? Its called "we know (and everyone should know) about deprivation of assets and that's despicable and rightly punishable". So for the last 20% of our seniors' lives, if they and we have not been clever like the Camerons and redistributed their wealth, however limited, then that money is already earmarked to the state or more correctly to state-favoured corporates.

Our condition is curable with a complete change of law, but it will take years for small-mindedness of the population at large to be cured. Let us hope that these changes begin soon. The tories have completely backed away from their suggestion of a reasonable cap which was supposed to leave £100,000 untouched by the state.

Many of us have a life expectancy of 90+ now.

Those born in 2015 have a 1 in 3 chance of suffering dementia in their lifetime. I think there are around a million sufferers in UK now.

Care home funding is not something that dementia suffering families should be funding themselves. The nature of the care is extremely questionable in any event and is dominated by large commercial operators with homes operated like secure mental institutions or even prisons. Quality of Life for around half of a typical care home's residents is pretty awful - how many have "toured" these places and seen how they work? Almost without fail you cannot get in the front door out of the rain until someone comes to unlock the door - often two doors - an airlock system. And you usually have to wait some time because staffing levels are not exactly high.

How much one-to-one care actually occurs and what sort of persons are paid what sort of money to deliver it? How much is spent on anti-depressants and sedatives in these places to keep agitation suppressed instead of real face to face care?

Are we all trying to keep facing forward and to close our minds to those that fall, a bit like cannon-fodder being forced across a battlefield? To what end? So our stupid low wage low tax economy can continue? For whose benefit?

How long will it take to cure the UK's sick cultural condition? Are all the posters in this board suffering from it? It looks epidemic.

AnotherJoe

Well you've thrown the kitchen sink in there at no use to the OP.

peterbaker

AnotherJoe wrote: »

Well you've thrown the kitchen sink in there at no use to the OP.

It's not the kitchen sink, it is the full nature of The "Dementia Tax" which the thread is skirting around without giving it a name. We should all be paying dementia tax same as we should all be paying tax to fund university tuition. My kids owe tens of thousands in student loans at 6% and they probably will end up paying them off, yet they are already, through their own acquired expertise beginning to create jobs for those that did not go to university, for example already able to support those who took apprenticeships and will progress to greater things that way. Apprenticeships are no guarantee of employment when apprenticeships end. It takes someone else's expertise to create the work that then allows the apprentices to continue.

My kids are still in their early twenties yet already beginning to contribute to the national economy that way! They work enormous hours - their university education wasn't a meal ticket to riches. It was to mould a young citizen into a valuable national resource. And yet their grandparents weren't even allowed to fund them through university if they wanted to! We are so flippin' short-sighted in the UK.

The OP is stuffed the same as the rest of us until the country sees sense. What would be of use to the OP is if all the posters talking knowledgably of that nasty little phrase "deprivation of assets" as if it is something we should worship, put their energies into changing the law instead of urging that we keep marching forward mesmerised as cannon fodder/survival of the fittest and all that.

I know that some will already be taking a hit in their families from dementia and other long-term non-state-funded care burdens, but I still think it is rather sick to see posters poking cases like this around with a long stick (with the clear thread consensus that the OP must wave goodbye to any modest capital his parents managed to build to put into a government sponsored commercial pot so the rest of us don't have to share in the costs of proper care of his mother) rather than urging changes to the system.

There, I needed to get that off my chest! Sorry Jazzhands if it is not all to your taste. Now, I need to log off and get some work done today. Have a good one everybody! Be nice while I am away.

AnotherJoe

It is the kitchen sink because what have "airlock" type doors got to do with anything (to pick one example you made). Or staying out in the rain until its opened. maybe they shoudl put porches in and thats the solution to dementia? That's why I said kitchen sink you've chucked all your frustrations into one post.
Even if you had three carers to each resident, you need to stop them wandering off looking for non existent places they lived, such as what my dad would have (and did) do. And there are some aggressive tendencies that do need to be medicated not just for the safety of the person being medicated but others in the home.

Hence, kitchen sink. Not just the cost but the arrangement of homes, medication, visitors staying out of the rain.

And all this is utterly irrelevant to the OPs Q which is about what the situation is today and not in some utopia you've invented. Yes,a dementia tax might do the job but take that and the other stuff off to a different forum. Its no different to someone asking about the intricacies of the Help To Buy scheme and you have a rant about it putting the price of houses up and blah blah blah. All very true but not helping the OP.

Terry_Towelling

I've been to quite a few care/nursing homes and not found any that particularly match what @peterbaker is describing. Most have publicly accessible front areas and locked off sections where the residents stay.

There is a reason to keep the doors locked and some of that may be 'make sure no one escapes, gets injured and their family sues us' but it is just one element in the necessary exercise of 'risk management' that goes with the territory. You also need to draw the distinction between care homes and nursing homes and the fact that some people choose to live as residents of a home.

On the subject of the 'chemical cosh' I am quite averse to the use of chemicals to control aggressive tendencies in dementia sufferers but I accept there may be little alternative in extreme cases. I have had to go through a 3 year phase of dealing with aggressive behaviour and have used medication on occasion. I was even told to use anti-psychotics but these just 'took away' the person so I stopped them very quickly and used (sparingly) an anti-anxiety medicine instead. Thankfully the aggression has now lessened and so I don't medicate at all.

Yes, I do agree that being obliged to pay for your own care stinks but, then, I would because I am faced with that possibility. What makes it galling is that those who take care of their wealth are later penalised for it and end up subsidising those who were profligate with their cash - or careful enough to hide it where it couldn't be grabbed. I do, however, accept that those who never had any wealth through no fault of their own will need to be catered for. I also find it strange that dementia care is classed as social care. The dementia process is a symptom of some underlying illness - not a social condition.

In this thread, the purchase of an apartment to replace the park home was made by OP - not his mum - and I presume it is held in his name only. She 'gifted' the £70K cash to help pay for OP's mortgage on the property. In the same way, she 'gifted' OP £50K 18 months earlier to help him pay his own mortgage. As far as deprivation of assets is concerned, the advice from age-related charities seems to be that where you might reasonably have known about an upcoming need for care and then disposed of your assets, you would still be considered as having possession of them for the funding means test.

I wonder whether this is something that actually breaches a person's human rights and whether there is some kind of financial limit and period of time over which it might not be seen as deprivation. For example, in the near 10 years since my wife acquired dementia, if she had gifted £3K pa (in line with HMRC tax-avoidance guidelines) would that be seen as deprivation? It might have been reasonable for her to know that care would be likely but why should that stop her from giving gifts?

One thing I do agree on is that 'taxation' has been demonised to such an extent that Governments will now find it very hard to increase it in order to do anything about the health crisis that many of us will find ourselves in given time. If we want state-funded education, health/social-care, effective council services etc then we have to accept that someone has to pay for it. It's all very well to say that those who choose university shouldn't expect the rest of us to pay for it and those who get ill should sort themselves out but we don't live in that sort of society; we live in a welfare society and, sooner or later, we are going to have to pay for it collectively through increased taxation.

lisyloo

if she had gifted £3K pa (in line with HMRC tax-avoidance guidelines) would that be seen as deprivation?

I am not a lawyer, but I think that had your wife carried on her usual level of christmas/birthday/wedding/charity giving then that would be fine.


If it suddenly increases from a box of chocs to a round-the-world cruise at the point of diagnosis then that might be seen as deprivation.


There is quite a grey area in between and in practice who is going to trace small amounts of cash. I'm not suggesting fraud here just making an observation that some things can be hidden (property transactions can not).


Morally I see no reason not to buy your normal level of wedding/birthday gifts or indeed enjoy holidays/spending on yourself.

and those who get ill should sort themselves out

Thats' not really practical.

we live in a welfare society and, sooner or later, we are going to have to pay for it collectively through increased taxation.

You have made the suggestion that we all pay more to expand long term care.
Not everyone may agree with you.
For example some people due to their genes may expect to die in their 50's.


I'm playing devils's advocate here to demonstrate this isn't a given that everyone wants that level of subsidy.
So why should everyone else pay for your long term care when you have your own assets??


As a second point - you do realise that if you cover dimensia then you'll need to cover arthtritis and pretty much everything else?
So what you then have is some rich old people payihng nothing and younger people and just about manging families facing a bigger tax burden?
I suspect most young people and just about managing people/families won't agree with you simply to preseve the wealth of people who can't benefit from it and the inheritance of others.


BTW - my MIL has dimmensia and is in a home.