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People are very worried about the issue of paying for Long Term Care. It is very easy to bury our heads in the sand with regards to this issue, as we all like to think that it will never happen to us. But everyone seems to know or have heard of people who have had to sell their home in order to pay for their care, but don’t quite know why or how they can avoid the same thing happening to themselves.
We all need to plan more carefully for our future, if we wish our beneficiaries to inherit what we feel is rightfully theirs. The sad fact is that you’ve worked hard for years to provide a valuable asset to pass on to your loved ones, but your home may be under real threat if you later require long-term residential or personal care.
The Community Care Act 1990 empowers Local Authorities with the responsibility of providing Long Term Care. However they will refuse to pay for many of the services they provide on a means tested basis if assets are above the current threshold of just £14,250. Families of this vulnerable sector are dis-inherited when everything their parents have ever worked for during a whole lifetime is wiped out in just a few years of long term care. In excess of 25,000 homes have to be sold each year to pay for care, that’s over 60 per day.
Individuals may be tempted to give assets away to overcome this. Such action is unlikely to be successful due to the deliberate deprivation rule, whereby gifted assets are still included for means test calculations regardless of how long ago they were given away.
Sadly, up to one in three women and one in five men will need formal care during their lifetime. There are more than 500,000 people living in residential care. And with a growing population of elderly the figure is rising! It is upsetting for widows and widowers, who together had worked so hard for the family home they intended to leave to their children, suddenly losing the family home to pay £30,000-£40,000 a year care costs.
But you can avoid this happening by organising your affairs effectively with the Protective Property Trust Will. This quite simply is designed to protect the value of the share of the deceased partner in the property, from being used to pay the care bills of the surviving partner if they require permanent residential care. It also allows the surviving partner all the benefits of occupation or to move to a different property and will prevent the deceased partner’s share in the property being inherited by a second husband or wife. Ultimately, it leaves your share of the home to pass to your loved ones in the fullness of time.
If you have no hesitation in having building insurance for your family home, then you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to also protect your home against the Community Care Act 1990.
Following my wife being taken into care as she was diagnosed with Alzheimers Disease, I was worried about our existing Wills. I contacted APS Legal and met with a lovely lady who advised me that I could change my Will but my wife could not change hers as she did not have capacity. APS Legal severed the tenancy on our bungalow to tenants in common which meant that my half of our bungalow would not go to my wife but to who I wanted to leave it to in my Will. This meant that if I died first then my wife would not inherit the whole bungalow allowing the local authority to sell the bungalow to cover her care home fees. My wife and I worked so hard for our bungalow and it was such a relief to know that should anything happen to me then our children would not lose everything. Thank you APS Legal & Associates. Mr I Driffill , Nottingham
