Selling/gifting your main property to your adult children and you renting a room

Savvy_Sue

I love my offspring dearly, and over the years - as they have started successful and lucrative careers - I have joked about them now being able to keep me in the manner to which I would like to become accustomed.

But I would never wish to live with them / have them live with me on anything other than an equitable basis. So were I living with one of them, I'd expect to fully pay my way, and vice versa. I'd also want each party to retain the ability to end the living arrangements in a sensible way. 

Selling or giving your house away in return for renting a room therein sounds like a recipe for a future disaster. 

I intend to retain control of what assets I have, and use them to ensure I have the kind of old age I choose. While I won't do anything to unnecessarily increase any IHT bill, and will indeed take steps to mitigate it if that's easily done, I'm unlikely to lose sleep over its potential size, because it's not me paying it. 

If I were likely to be leaving an estate with an IHT liability, I would get professional advice about how to deal with it, but NOTHING I would do would be at the expense of my retaining control of my own life - which giving away my home certainly seems to. 

Marcon

UnsureAboutthis said:

Voyager2002 said:

You might want to separate the two issues that concern you:
1. if you give away a house or other assets in order to make yourself eligible for a means-tested benefit (such as a care home), then 'deprivation of assets' becomes relevant: if it can be shown that the reason was for the gift was in order to qualify, then you are treated as if you still owned it. 

2. a separate property is that posed by inheritance tax: if you make a "gift with reservations", for example giving someone your home on the condition that you can still live in it, then that gift has not removed any liability for IHT. 

Better to work separately towards solution to these two problems.

Thanks. The questions are not just for me, hence the multi options/scenarios.

What if the house was gifted (not forgetting the parents have at least one other property, if not more btl's paid off)
then they stay in it with their child that moves in, having sold their place and the parents pay market rent for rent a room and no written agreement which states the parents have a right to remain there until they decide to leave and this is supported by an AST agreement.  

I know of parents that sold and gave away their property a few years ago in their 70's in order to help their children buy a preprty and the parents live at, spend time between the two places EG, a week in one place and possibly two in another and would then stay in the property that was empty ie when their children go on hoildays or one goes away to work abroad for a few months at a time. They pay no rent but help with the bills.

Sorry, many scenarios/questions, However, all posts so far help in their own way.

Get some proper professional advice - and stick to the questions which do apply to you. Let others get their own advice, otherwise you are in serious danger of confusing the hell out of everyone, including yourself! 

Nobody here has anything like enough background information to give definitive answers - and they aren't insured to give advice to other forum users, so if anything goes wrong (free advice is often worth about as much as you paid for it), you're stuck.