Putting our house in trust Help Please

MEM62

arthurx1234 said:

Gadfium said:

arthurx1234 said:

Yes we are trying to avoid care home charges

Niiice....so you want the taxpayer to fund your care in your dotage. Why would you want to throw yourself on the benevolence of others and why would you want to spend your last years in a place that won the council contract by being the lowest bidder?

When you go on holiday, do you pick the absolute cheapest doss-house that you can find and eat from soup kitchens too?

As i have paid tax and NI contributions for 45+ years and never been given a hand out from the state ie dole, universal credit, housing benefit, free dental etc etc, So i must have paid for numerous scumbags to sit on thier !!!!!! in the house smoke and drink and drain the nhs and taxpayer ie ME and possibly you, so its time for me to be "creative" with my assets, but ironically  it will not be me who benefits but the kids,  sometimes i wish we were like Wayne & Waynetta slob

Arthur

Your example of what your taxes have paid for is interesting.  The unemployment benefit, to which you seem to have such disdain, hardly accounts for much of the overall expenditure.  In fact, the entire welfare budget is only accounts for 14% of tax expenditure.  Education, pensions and healthcare combined account for 48%. Do you begrudge those too?  You cast dispersion and type-cast those that have claimed unemployment benefit, yet you think that you have the right to take money from the rest of us tax-payers in order preserve and pay for your children's inheritance.    
I suggest that your moral compass needs some adjustment.   

arthurx1234

Well not alot of good advice regarding where i can get additional info regarding pros and cons of putting house intrust, just comments about my post, so will get the mods to close the thread down, bye

Arthur

elsien

xylophone said:

Yes we are trying to avoid care home charges

Wilful deprivation of assets in order to obtain, maintain or increase means tested benefits?

https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/factsheets/fs40_deprivation_of_assets_in_social_care_fcs.pdf

Deprivation covers a broad range of ways you might transfer a capital asset out of your possession. Annex E of the guidance provides the following examples that may be deemed to be deprivation of capital:

• assets put in to a trust that cannot be revoked

This was pretty good advice about one of the major disadvantages of a trust for the purposes you want it for. 

elsien

xylophone said:

We have altered our wills/deeds so we each own half of our house

You have changed from joint tenants to tenants in common.

Whichever way you own the house, if one of you remains in it and one goes into care, the property cannot be taken into account in the means test.

If both, then it can.

If in your will you leave your share to a person other than your spouse ( usually with a lifetime interest in possession to the spouse) and you die, then should the survivor need care, only the survivor's share can be taken into account in the means test.

Do your wills include the arrangement above?

As was this post.
As does the post explaining that the majority of people tend not to need to go into care anyway.
You are getting good advice. It's just not want you want to hear.

bowlhead99

arthurx1234 said:

Well not alot of good advice regarding where i can get additional info regarding pros and cons of putting house intrust, just comments about my post, so will get the mods to close the thread down, bye

Arthur

elsien said:
This was pretty good advice about one of the major disadvantages of a trust for the purposes you want it for. 

elsien said:
As was this post.

As does the post explaining that the majority of people tend not to need to go into care anyway.
You are getting good advice. It's just not want you want to hear.

The attitude seen from arthurx is perhaps not too surprising: maybe someone who wants to 'game the system' by deliberately depriving themselves of their own assets to provide riches for their thirtysomething kids while making the taxpayer pick up the tab for their later-life care, is statistically likely to also be the kind of 'entitled' person who wants to get a moderator to close the thread down as a protest that if they don't hear the advice they want to hear, nobody else should be allowed to comment.  Perhaps he is expecting the taxpayer to pick up the bill for forum moderation services too.

Perhaps with hindsight, if someone is going to moan on a public forum that they have not had enough handouts over their lifetime and are 'trying to avoid care charges' by being 'creative with my assets' and don't want the local authority to get wind of it, they should simply create a new throwaway user account to ask their questions rather than use their existing old account and then try to get the thread closed down.

Sailtheworld

arthurx1234 said:

Well not alot of good advice regarding where i can get additional info regarding pros and cons of putting house intrust, just comments about my post, so will get the mods to close the thread down, bye

Arthur

You could always sell up and give everything to your children now. If/ when you need residential care I doubt the council would give two hoots that you did this twenty years previous (but they might). Just make sure your remaining cash and assets stay under the limit for the rest of your life and consider living in Wales where the threshold is higher. It's a bit drastic for what will likely be less than £40k out of your total net worth a lot of which can be funded by pension income or savings rather than a house sale.

The house being in trust is going to stick out like a sore thumb and you won't be able to explain it away - it's obvious what's going on. It won't work because it can still be seen as deprivation of assets. Also, if you can't afford to to be housed somewhere decent your kids will probably sell it anyway so that you can.

csgohan4

as above, just because it's not advice your wanting to hear, doesn't mean it's wrong. Perhaps suggest getting paid advice from an IFA, rather than throwing your toys out with strangers who provide advice for free. 

You could always try mums net...

coyrls

Do mums net charge for their expert advice?

Sebo027

csgohan4 said:

as above, just because it's not advice your wanting to hear, doesn't mean it's wrong. Perhaps suggest getting paid advice from an IFA, rather than throwing your toys out with strangers who provide advice for free. 

You could always try mums net...

It's interesting the response this type of question has received. To be fair to @arthurx1234 he asked for some objective advice, and while there might be some snippets of reasonable information for him to consider there, the vast majority of the replies on this thread were more concerned with "why he was asking" and subsequently tarring and feathering him for his considerations.

I've been mulling it over and I guess it quickly strays into political territory and maybe that's why it attracted such a heated response. The state takes this money and funds public services. Should housing be state provided? What about medical care - the NHS - means tested or free for all? Should free care for the elderly or infirm be a state provided service? I don't know. I support fundementally the problem we have in the UK is there are more old people, living longer, and the state can't support long term care in care homes, similar to how we cannot expect to receive a pension at 65 anymore (for men). Interestingly enough, though, the government is considering a shake up - implementing an additional tax for those over 40 years old to help fund future care:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jul/26/uk-ministers-looking-at-plans-to-raise-taxes-for-over-40s-to-pay-for-social-care
Quote:

Adopting a similar approach would let Johnson say he has ended the situation whereby some pensioners deemed too wealthy to qualify for local council-funded care have to sell their homes to pay care home costs, which can exceed £1,400 a week.

This factsheet provided on the Deprivation of assets in social care was interesting and thanks for the share. A quote:

People should be treated with dignity and respect and be able to spend the money they have saved as they wish – it is their money after all.…[but] it is important that people pay the contribution to their care costs that they are responsible for. This is key to the overall affordability of the care and support system. A local authority should therefore ensure that people are not rewarded for trying to avoid paying their assessed contribution.

The criteria for assessment seems to be largely based on intent, so I would think it would be perfectly legal to transfer assets or money to children or whoever provided you have a good reason for doing so, and provided that reason is not to avoid care home liability... It's a bit like inheritance tax, would we scoff at someone who deliberately works within the rules to gift their children a degree of their assets to avoid breaking the IHT threshold? 

csgohan4

Maybe put your assets in to an offshore untraceable account in Panama or Switzerland.