It is estimated that over a third of people attaining 65 will need some form of care either in a residential care home or in their own home. This care will need to be paid for.

You will have worked much of your life to pay for your home and to build a nest egg and instead of it being left to your children, the assets have to be liquidised in order to pay the care home fees. Every year as many as 70,000 homes have to be sold to meet the liability. If you go into long term care the local authority can seize all but £23,250 of your assets as a contribution to the cost. 

With years of experience in care funding law, the wealth structuring and inheritance planning team can advise you on steps to take to protect your assets in ways which do not contravene the local authority’s deprivation of capital assets rules. Our professional approach will help guide you through the complexities of the rules and ensure, through a variety of measures such as the structure of your Will and the ownership of your assets, that your estate is retained for the benefit of your family.

The local authority primary care trusts use complicated rules and criteria to assess how much you should be paying for elderly care. Due to their complexity the assessments can be wrong which could mean you paying out more than you should. We are able to advise you on whether the assessment carried out is on the correct legal basis and also help you to reclaim money which have been incorrectly paid out in the past.

Working with you and your family we will advise on:

• The local authority assessment including how income and capital should be dealt with and which assets should be disregarded.
• Wills and how best to structure them
• The ownership and management of assets you own jointly and how the local authority should assess them
• Deferred payment agreements with social services
• The charging rules for temporary care
• Lasting Powers of Attorney