Moving into retirement property, ESA, Pension?

Pabbiel

Hi, my husband is my carer as I am disabled. Now he has a severe illness as well, which, thankfully, is in remission at the moment. When he was working he paid into a pension. We currently live in a one-bedroom flat, our health is harder to cope with. We are benefits, ESA, carers and disability benefits. At the moment his pension is in a pension pot so does not affect our benefits until he takes it out of the pot. We would like to move into a retirement property,  We would like to use the pension and the money from our flat (shared ownership) to move. My question is, is it legal to do this? We don't want to do anything wrong. If we moved then the ESA wouldn't need to help with rent, but we would still need some ESA until we were able to get a state pension. Does anyone know the law, DWP rules on this? also any links that could help.

Alice_Holt

Is the ESA income based or contribution based ?

Your disability benefits, and carers allowance are not means tested so would be unaffected by capital.

Are you in receipt of any other means-tested benefits ?

When you have more than £16k in total savings / capital (from withdrawing the pension), any IB - ESA and other means-tested benefits (HB ? ) will stop.
When you move into the retirement property and your savings are below £16k you can claim UC.
(A UC decision maker may consider deprivation of capital, but IMO it's very unlikely that you would be denied UC on that basis).

Proceeds of the sale of the current flat may be disregarded if you use them to purchase the retirement property.   


Pension Wise may be able to give you some guidance on withdraws from the pension pot:
https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/pensions-and-retirement/pension-wise

calcotti

Pabbiel said:

If we moved then the ESA wouldn't need to help with rent, 

ESA doesn't provide help with rent - that is provided through Housing Benefit (for existing claims only) or Universal Credit.