How much can you keep before paying for care and how to avoid selling your house to pay for care?
It can be a shock to many people when they find out they may have to pay over £100,000 for their care home costs. Therefore, it is only natural that people are looking at protecting their assets from nursing home fees and looking at how to avoid, and not sell, their property when going into care.
This is especially the case if you are looking to leave your family home to your children.
One of the most regular questions we get asked is how to avoid selling your house to pay for care.
You cannot deliberately look to avoid care fees by gifting your property or putting a house in trust to avoid care home fees. This is known as deprivation of assets. However, there are routes you can take that stay on the right side of the law.
If you do this, your local authority will come after you, and possibly the person that was given the transfer of assets to reclaim what is owed. However, you can mitigate against this.
Please see below.
By purposely giving away your property, such as the family home, there is a risk that it is seen as deliberate deprivation of assets. If you do this, your property may still be assessed when your assets are calculated.
There are legitimate reasons as to why you can gift your assets without them potentially being used as part of the calculation to see if you have to pay for your care fees.
It is possible to put your house into a Trust and assign your property to someone else, such as your children. However, there have to be other reasons as to why you put your property into a trust and not just because you don’t want to pay your care fees.
The three main types of Trusts that people use to protect their property are typically;
Protective Property Trust.
Life Interest Trust.
Interest in Possession Trust.
We VERY strongly recommend that you speak to a Trust specialist, such as a solicitor, if you want to consider these options so you can ensure the trust is valid and you are not doing it simply to deprive yourself of assets. You can leave your contact details below, and we will help you.
Alternatives to going into a care home are to consider include domiciliary care and having care at home.
The most popular way to avoid selling your house to pay for your care is to use equity release. If you own your own house, you can look at Equity Release. This allows you to take money out of your house and use that to fund your care.
If you have assets that take you above the threshold it is really important that you speak to an advisor and get financial advice about what you can do with your savings.
Many people find themselves in denial as their health starts to deteriorate. Even though they approach old age with mobility issues or memory loss, they delay considering residential care altogether.
This means that they don’t make any provisions financially in case they do need to access domiciliary or residential care in the future.
The key to avoiding paying for care home fees and home care fees is to get financial advice as early as possible.
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