Care home fees

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in life expectancy across the population. A knock on effect of this has been a large increase in people requiring long term care, often in residential care or nursing homes.

The realisation of the need to enter a care home will be a difficult time for the person involved and their family.

Added to this many people will be concerned about the possibility of their home having to be sold to pay for residential care home fees and want to know if this can be avoided.

Local authority rules for payment of fees for residential care can be complex. It is not always the case that your house will be taken into account when assessing you for care fees, for example, if your spouse or certain other dependent relatives live in the house with you.

However, in some cases the value of your house may be taken into account in local authority means testing.

There are ways to protect the value of your home from being used to fund care home fees, such as a Protective Property Trust, however trusts such as this need to be set up well in advance to ensure that they are effective.

This is a complex area and specialist advice should always be sought.

We can offer advice on planning your estate in the most effective way possible as well as the possible implications of transferring property out of your name.