Care Planning for the Elderly
Confused about the rules on financing elderly care?
On the face of it, the funding rules for financing elderly care in a residential or nursing home appear straightforward. If you have assets above £23,000, you pay for your care in full unless you are entitled to NHS Continuing Healthcare Funding to pay for nursing care.
But it is not as simple as that. Social services use complicated rules and criteria to assess how much you should be paying for care home services. But some of these rules can allow your house and other significant assets to be ignored when it comes to calculating your assets.
Unfortunately, the complexity of social services’ funding rules has led to a great deal of misinformation about paying for elderly care. As a result, many people are being forced into selling their homes and other assets when it comes to paying for care home fees - £50,000 a year in some parts of the country.
How solicitors specialising in care planning for the elderly can help
Care planning for the elderly can go a long way to helping you protect your financial future or that of a partner, spouse or child. Care funding expert Cate Searle has a nationwide reputation for helping families plan for and protect their financial security when a loved one goes into care. This may involve preventing the sale of the family home and ensuring a partner has enough to live on after paying for care home fees.
For advice on the legal issues surrounding paying for care home fees email Cate Searle or call her on 01273 609911. For advice on paying for nursing care see our NHS continuing healthcare page.
How we can help when you go into care
When you go into care, we can help ensure social services correctly and properly apply the financial assessment rules to ensure you are not asked to pay too much towards the cost of your care. Moving into care may be a crisis point in your life, or it may have been carefully planned over a long period. Either way, care funding expert Cate Searle will guide you through the details of your case to ensure you do not pay more than you should.
We will advise on:
- How income and capital should be assessed.
- What income and investments social services should disregard.
- Whether social services’ assessments should ignore the value of your family home.
- How social services should treat your jointly held assets.
- What to do if social services identify a deprivation of capital.
We can also help with:
- Deferred payment agreements with social services - interest free loans to pay for residential care.
- Top up fees and ‘more expensive accommodation’ including out of area placements.
- Charging rules for temporary care placements.
- Help with paying for care in your own home, rather than going in to residential care.
- Disabled facilities grants for adapting your home.
- Direct payments and the new rules for personal or individual budgets.
Cate Searle is also an expert in NHS continuing healthcare. She has successfully reclaimed nursing home fees for families who have wrongly been denied help paying for nursing care. As well as reclaiming lump sums in retrospective fees - up to £90,000 in one case - she regularly saves families as much as £1,000 a week in ongoing nursing home charges. Find out more about NHS care funding advice.
How we can help you plan for the future
When it comes to financing elderly care, it makes sense to consider how you will pay should you or your spouse need residential or nursing care - and what the consequences will be for the spouse who remains at home. With more than 15 years’ hands-on experience in care funding and care funding law, Cate Searle can advise on steps you can take to protect your family’s financial security that do not break social services’ deprivation of capital rules.
Our community care law experts can also help with a range of complementary legal issues to ensure your maximum peace of mind, including:
- Creating a Lasting Power of Attorney.
- Managing jointly held assets, including the family home.
Want to talk to us?
If you would like to talk to us for help with social services’ funding rules or advice on care planning for the elderly email Cate Searle or call your local martin searle solicitors’ office on 01273 609911 (Brighton) or 0208 256 4490 (Croydon).
