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Long Term Care Planning

More and more people are concerned about the possibility that they may have to sell their family home to fund care, 70,000 people each year sell their home for this reason. Out of the men retiring today, 1 in 6 will require full time care, out of all men, 1 in 4 will require some type of care. For women, 1 in 4 will require full time care and 1 in 3 will require some form of care.

We provide below brief details on the issue of long term care and advice for ways in which your assets can be protected from the government.

How Government will assess your assets

When the Government looks at your need for care they will consider your income and capital and assess how you will be able to pay for the care. The income that they will include are any pensions, some state benefits, earnings, dividend Income or ‘Interest’ and Tariff income. They will not include some state benefits and charitable or voluntary payments.

The Government will also look at what capital you have and will include and property or land, bank and building society accounts, national savings, unit trusts and withdrawal from bonds. However, the government will not include your home when there are dependants living there, and a life assurance policies.

Therefore it is important that you assess your assets and possibly re-organise your portfolio. Another alternative is to look at gifting your assets a putting assets into a trust, with help from The Specter Partnership.

The Family Home

By putting your share of the family home into trust, you can also avoid your home being sold in order to pay for residential care. Under the Community Care Act 1990, the local authority can seize and sell your home and use the sale proceeds to fund your care. Given the increasing cost of care it could well be the case that upon your death there will be little if any sale proceeds left. The local authority cannot force you to sell your home if it is in trust as the property no longer belongs to yourself but to trustees. Therefore your home can be left to your family and not be used to fund the care.

However, simply putting your home into trust to avoid paying care home fees is illegal. Yet it is not illegal for you to make a provision in your will for your share of the home to be placed into trust. If your spouse does the same this will then protect your home from being sold to pay for care.

However if the home is put in a bare trust, this is a trust where there is only one named beneficiary, then the property will be considered to be part of the beneficiaries estate. However if the beneficiary has to pay for medical fees then the house may have to be sold in any event to fund the treatment.

How Can The Specter Partnership Help?

We are happy to assist with the creation of trusts in order to protect the family home and also provide assistance when looking at your estate as a whole.

Please contact us on 0800 019 3460 to discuss your requirements.