Cost of care for the elderly

MobileSaver

Spendless said:

Looking into DOA as standard. I recently discovered it's that an LA can look into it rather than they will.

Something like 90% of local authorities are now struggling to balance the books so moving forward I'd say it's inevitable that more emphasis will be put into checking for DoA. 

It's probably also a very cost effective measure given that each LA investigator might only have to find one DoA case a year and that's their wages paid for!

Pollycat

Exodi said:

Pollycat said:

Exodi said:

Pollycat said:

Exodi said:

Pollycat said:

AskAsk said:

Pollycat said:

AskAsk said:

Pollycat said:

AskAsk said:

Lindagreenacre said:

Think that I need to go on expensive holidays.  

lol, exactly this!  people spends thousands on expensive cruises when they retire.  time to see the world and enjoy the money they have worked for and saved up all their working life.  then, some years down the line, they need care and if only they had not gone on those expensive holidays and blew all that money.  so now, the rest of us have to pay for this......  things need to change as the rest of us can't afford to pay for care for the elderly any more as it is becoming a crisis with people living longer and so inevitably ending up in care.

So what do you suggest?
That people who have worked all their lives (as I and my husband have) are not allowed to go on holidays in case they need the money to pay for their care that may or may not be required?

Not everyone will end up going into a care home.

with people living longer, care is inevitable.  you may not go into a care home but you may need care visits at home, which is also funded by the council.

at the moment there is no requirement for people to save towards old age, and i think it is about time that people are forced to do so.  it is not possible to expect younger people to continue to pay the bills for the elderly because they have spent all their money on holidays or gifted it to their children and grandchildren.

I have said before, there needs to be a compulsory plan, like the personal pension, where everyone needs to contribute and that can used later on for care needs.  if you don't need to use the pot, you can use it for funeral expense or your relation can inherit it.  At the moment, the public purse pays for everything, and people do not have to contribute if their savings or income are below a certain threshold at the time.  They may have used up a lot of money by that time, that they wouldn't otherwise have done if they thought they needed to save for care.

I am posting purely from my own situation.
Having had a reasonably well paid job (in IT), I've paid a load of NI contributions over my working life.
I've not taken any benefits out, not even child benefit.
My council tax has gone towards funding for schools - which I've not benefited from.
I have a private pension together with my state pension.
That funds my lifestyle, which includes several holidays each year.
I've saved for my retirement - so I've saved for my old age even though there was/is no requirement to do so.
Nobody forced me to do it.

There is no certainty that I will need care at home. If there is, I will be able to fund it myself.

I have no children or grandchildren to gift my money to.

The'public purse' pays nothing for me.

You're banging the drum at the wrong person.

when i reply to your comments, i am not aiming the comments at you but the population as a general concept.  in the past people didn't live as long and so the majority of people did not need to go into a care home before they passed away.  the population is living longer and we aren't designed to live this long, so although we are still alive, our bodies and brains have often shut down and we are living on borrowed time with care and medical advance.

as more and more people fall into this category, social care is going to become unaffordable to the nation as a whole as it is the young people that will need to pay more taxes to fund these social care.  council tax includes a large proportion for social care.  I just don't think this funding model is going to be possible for much longer and soon the government will look into ways of getting people to fund more for themselves.

this may be why they will start to be stricter with people giving away assets before they retire and changing the rules on gifts.

I would object to being told I must save towards potential care home fees.

I hope any government will come up with a better scheme than that.

It's clear you disagree with @AskAsk, but do you have a better suggestion?

I'd hope you can accept that the current situation of pensioners 'gifting' everything they own to their kids or racing through their savings as quickly as possible, so that they don't have a penny to their names at the point they might need care is not tenable.

No, I don't have a better suggestion.
I prefer not to put forward a suggestion at all than propose a crackpot suggestion that you yourself call "not practical, reasonable or agreeable to anyone".

You've misquoted what I said:

Exodi said:

Either we prevent people spending their own money (which is not practical, reasonable or agreeable to anyone), we allocate an individual pot of money towards it that people have no choice over, allocate a public pot via increased taxation, tighten DoA checks, or ???

So of the options I mentioned (but formatted better) were:

1. Prevent people from being able to spend large chunks of their own money (effectively preventing people from 'gifting' any significant amount of money to children or going on multiple expensive cruises) - this is not what AskAsk suggested or was being discussed and what I said would not be practical, reasonable or agreeable to anyone. I included it for completeness.

2. Have people contribute to an individual pot, much like how a private pension works - which is what AskAsk suggested with rules about how discretionary it could be (because clearly a lot of people would prefer to opt out to give the money to their children, and have the taxpayer foot the bill for their care as happens currently).

3. Have people contribute to a national pot, much like how the state pension works - which isn't popular, as we saw with Boris Johnson toying with this idea including a sloppy implementation where originally young people were expected to pay for pensioners care through increased NI, but pensioners would not. I think after a cumulative 19.5% increase to the state pension over the past 2 years, workers are less sympathetic to pensioners at the moment. Yes some pensioners are poor, but more are not.

4. Tightening DoA checks I think most of us could get behind, but I've no idea how much can be achieved here. This might be one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but doesn't achieve much more in practice.

5. Any other ideas people had.

Pollycat said:

Of course I think it wrong to gift money to avoid care home fees.
I've said so on many similar threads.

It does appear we're all on the same page though, I'm personally getting quite fatigued by seeing the same threads week in week out trying to circumvent DoA restrictions and force the taxpayer to fund their parents care so they can realise the maximum inheritance possible. No shame in these threads as people perform the mental gymnastics required to convince themselves that it is somehow not fair to pay for your own care, because [people on benefits], [foreigners], etc.

If everyone with the original means were to pay for their own care, I_Love_comps mum wouldn't need to be paying over £8k per month. I understand we are in this endless feedback loop where 'costs are high because people avoid paying for their own care' and 'people avoid paying for their own care because costs are high' but councils are on their knees and something has to give.

All those people wanting to avoid paying for care (or quite often, it's the children who expect to inherit that look for ways to avoid their parent(s) paying for care to protect that inheritance), before giving their money away should consider what quality of life they may expect if they end up in a LPA funded home like my Mum did (sadly she was unable to pay for her own care).

[Deleted User] said:

I believe the assumption that all LA care homes are bad is misplaced and unfair on those people that work in them to provide a good level of care. There have been plenty of examples of private care homes behaving badly

Pollycat said:
I don't assume that all LA care homes are bad.
I base my opinion on the 2 care/nursing homes that my Mum was unfortunate enough to be in for the last couple of years of her life.
Within a 6 month period she was the subject of 2 safeguarding investigations - 1 in each home.
The 2nd care home did not act in accordance with their processes and procedures after a fall at night. 2 days later she had another fall and was dead a week later.
The care home gave us her belongings.
Half the clothes did not belong to her.
A hairbrush clearly labelled with someone else's name was included.
The care home consistently failed to perform in accordance with their processes and procedures in a number of areas.

My complaint against the care home and LA was upheld by the Ombudsman.

I know that the majority of people employed in care homes do provide a good level of care.
A pity my Mum didn't benefit from that.

Someone posted this on another thread - I agree with Elsien.
And I find any suggestion directed at me regarding DDOA offensive.

Pollycat said:

elsien said:

There is a difference though between spending your money to have a decent quality of life in your retirement and deliberately getting shot of it "just in case." 

SouthCoastBoy said:

elsien said:

There is a difference though between spending your money to have a decent quality of life in your retirement and deliberately getting shot of it "just in case." 

Yes, I won't be deliberately overspending just in case I need to go into a care home, as how do you know when that would be. If you deliberately overspend you may run out of money. Why worry about a care home, it's something that may never happen.

Worse is those people who ask how their parents can preserve their 'inheritance' instead of paying for their own care.

On a thread asking that, one poster said these type of threads were becoming tiresome and suggested that Martin covered 'deprivation of capital' in one of his shows.
That whole thread appears to have been removed.

Hi @Pollycat,

Sorry I didn't see your message before I posted. Agree with everything you say in this comment (and sorry about your mum). To be clear (I don't know whether you were responding to me in particular) but I'd hope that no-one thinks you would consider DDOA - it's clear from your views this and many other threads you couldn't be any further in the opposite camp.

Regarding "On a thread asking that, one poster said these type of threads were becoming tiresome and suggested that Martin covered 'deprivation of capital' in one of his shows. That whole thread appears to have been removed." I suspect that was me. Frustrated by these threads in general I've been repeatedly requesting that these threads should not be allowed (it's not allowed to make a thread asking how to rob banks, I don't know why it's allowed to make a thread asking how to rob taxpayers), and it would be useful for Martin to proactively address this on TV because there is clearly a deeply ingrained attitude that it's somehow unfair to pay for your own care, and we hear the same 2 or 3 arguments repeated time and time again - sometimes people think as they've 'paid into the system their whole life' it should be free, or usually some justification involving people on benefits, or foreigners, or tax-avoiding rich people, or any other demographic you might see vilified in the Daily Mail.

No, it wasn't directed at you.
It was directed at AskAsk who seems to insist that I will need care at some time in the future and that I am busy trying to find ways of ridding myself of my assets so that other people have to pay for my care.

And yes, I remember it was your comment about certain threads becoming tiresome..
It really struck a chord with me and I agreed 100% with it.

This is a money-saving website.
Not a 'screw everybody else' website.

Pollycat

MobileSaver said:

Spendless said:

Looking into DOA as standard. I recently discovered it's that an LA can look into it rather than they will.

Something like 90% of local authorities are now struggling to balance the books so moving forward I'd say it's inevitable that more emphasis will be put into checking for DoA. 

It's probably also a very cost effective measure given that each LA investigator might only have to find one DoA case a year and that's their wages paid for!

I think LA's owe it to people paying taxes to investigate where they think there has been potential DDOA.

tooldle

I’m guessing it is a ‘may’ rather than a ‘will’ from the LA on DDoA, simply because not everyone has a financial assessment and of those that do, some will be paying for their own care. A tricky thing to set a threshold for given the balance between assets and life expectancy. 

Gavin83

Spendless said:

Not everyone will go into care but the longer you live it's possibly more likely. One of my Nans developed dementia and went into care a month before her 91st birthday, she then lived for a further 8 years (and of the relatives I've had in care all have lived longer than the average 12 months talked about) . My other Nan is 98.5 living in her own house, recently went into hospital following a fall, the carers set up in a plan for her discharge stopped coming after  3 visits deeming her 'too capable' but she now has an alarm on her wrist and a warning that another fall may mean she has to go into care and she's dreading this happening to her. 

It's been a while since I worked in this area but when I last did the average life expectancy for someone going into care was around 2 years. However this could vary greatly. In some cases some people would survive days or even hours. There was one case I dealt with where she died within about half hour of entering the care home, her son hadn't even left yet. On the other end of the scale we had one woman who was in care for 33 years, which was our record excluding anyone with learning disabilities who had received care at a younger age. Honestly though anything beyond 5 years was unusual and 10 years was rare.

MobileSaver said:

Spendless said:

Looking into DOA as standard. I recently discovered it's that an LA can look into it rather than they will.

Something like 90% of local authorities are now struggling to balance the books so moving forward I'd say it's inevitable that more emphasis will be put into checking for DoA. 

It's probably also a very cost effective measure given that each LA investigator might only have to find one DoA case a year and that's their wages paid for!

One of my primary jobs was finding cases of DoA and in all honesty I was quite good at it. I found all sorts of tactics and as you'd expect it was common. However some still slipped through the net. Every year we'd pull a number of cases and review them and we'd always find a few with undeclared assets. Some of these could result in a substantial bill, even into 6 figures on occasion.

One that I always remember was a guy who transferred his mums property into his name before she went into care and somehow it was missed. Was found a few years later and therefore he was sent a bill for £80k. He rung me up and was very aggressive and threatening but basically said he wouldn't be paying it and there was no money left anyway as he'd used it all retiring early, paying off his mortgage, going on cruises and buying cars. Ended up with our solicitor who actually offered him a deal to pay £40k of it and we'd write off the rest. He refused. It ended up going to court, he lost and had to pay the £80k, plus our legal costs as well as his own. I believe the final costs topped £100k in the end and he ended up having to return to work and remortgage his house. The moral of this story is deprivation can catch up with you, even if you think you've got away with it. 

You're right though, when I did this job councils had a lot more money than they do now. I expect they're even more strict than we were back then.

Malthusian

Spendless said:

 IIRC Theresa May when PM, suggested that people could keep £100K before it was used for care costs. They was then a huge outcry about it from the gen public, which I didn't understand, the amount you can keep is £14, 250 currently (and you're helped with costs between 14250 and 23250). Why were people objecting to being able to keep more? 

It was partly because under May's proposals, people who currently receive domiciliary care courtesy of the taxpayer would have to pay for it instead, potentially via a charge on their house. Currently if you need domiciliary care, the value of your own home is excluded from the financial assessment, but under May's proposal it would not have been. 

But it was mainly because Labour called it a "dementia tax" and the papers called it a "dementia tax" and many of May's own party called it a "dementia tax", because May was already extremely unpopular within her own party (being a Remainer) and the proposal made her even more unpopular, as it threatened the inheritances of many of her members. Nobody actually cared about the nuances of the existing social care system, it was a stick to beat May with during a general election.

The upper limit going up to £100,000 was neither here nor there. The "dementia tax" nonsense is whipped up by people (in particular London journalists) who are afraid that their parents' £500,000+ inheritance will disappear on care fees. Teresa May promising that Tarquin, Jemima and Cordelia would get at least £33k each instead of £5k was never going to mollify them. 

(Some) Pensions used to have life insurance as part of them. I have at least one pension dating back from the 1990s that has. Maybe return to something that that but instead of the LI something that helps with care costs.

If someone can afford to pay care insurance premiums via their pension, they should be paying higher pension contributions for themselves, and that pension money would then be included in the care fee assessment. 

JIL

My mum has dementia, she would be horrified to know that her savings are now being used to fund her care.  It was something I always disagreed with her about. The money is hers. Why should I expect the state/taxpayers to fund her care in order for me to have that as an inheritance.  
I dont want her money, I want my mum to have some quality of life in her final years. 
I wont be thinking about how unfair it is, that some of her fellow residents are fully funded. The truth is I dont actually care, I'm more bothered about how this awful disease affects families, money then doesn't seem important.

My mum and dad paid into pensions when they worked, they didnt have big spending sprees, but they were able to do a lot of travelling in earlier retirement years.  They made some wonderful memories and because they had been sensible in retirement planning, they could afford it.


If you rely on the state, you get minimum income until you are able to get your state pension. Counting the pennies. 

Live your own lives without thinking about unfairness. It removes a lot of unwanted stress. 

LightFlare

there is always the question of who should pay

We currently are almost in a perfect storm for health and social care 

We have a record number of old people requiring ever more complex (and costly) care - who also spent less years than the current and future generations will have to paying into the system and got to retire 7 years earlier (for now)

We have a record number of economically inactive people 

The few that are left have a limit to how much they can be taxed

Where does the shortfall in funding come from ?

Pollycat

LightFlare said:

there is always the question of who should pay

We currently are almost in a perfect storm for health and social care 

We have a record number of old people requiring ever more complex (and costly) care - who also spent less years than the current and future generations will have to paying into the system and got to retire 7 years earlier (for now)

We have a record number of economically inactive people 

The few that are left have a limit to how much they can be taxed

Where does the shortfall in funding come from ?

The majority of people did not reach state pension age at 60 years of age.
For as long as I can remember - at least as far back as 1960s - men received their state pension at age 65.
This was increased to 66 a few years ago and is now 67.
Women received their state pension - if they were eligible - at age 60. 
Many women paid the lower rate stamp which meant they did not receive a pension at age 60 in their own right. They had to wait until their husband reached state pension age.
The state pension age for women was raised gradually to 65 years to equalise it with men.
I was 60 in 2013.
I did not receive my state pension until 2018.
I did not 'get to retire' 7 years earlier than now.
Actually, you can retire whenever you like. It's when you become eligible for state pension that is the key date.

So there are very few people who were eligible for their pension 7 years before those retiring now.

EnPointe

MobileSaver said:

Exodi said:

councils are on their knees and something has to give.

As you say, something has to give.

One approach is to reduce the cost of care and so perhaps allowing dormitory-style bedrooms instead of everyone getting a private room is a way of making limited funds go further? (A knock-on benefit being it would disincentivise many people from deliberately disposing of assets...)

 are you actually advocating  a return to  abusive county pauper lunatic asylum system ?

do you   understand  how undignified  not having a private room is when you  may  require intimiate care ?