Later Life Care Costs
Planning for Care Home Costs
Planning for the future requires considering who will care for you as you age, where that care might take place, and how it will be paid for.
The UK has specific rules about care funding, which centres on how much an individual’s assets are worth. Later life care costs can have a dramatic affect on your hard earned wealth.
Put simply, if you have assets – such as a property or savings – worth more than £23,250 (£30,000 in Wales) you will have to foot the bill for all the care services required to keep you safe. Currently, annual care home costs in England average between £26,000 and £75,000. This means that there is significantly less money passed down to your loved ones and beneficiaries when you pass away.
Planning for the future – take control
You can take steps to plan for potential future care home fees by implementing a Trust. A Lifetime Trust can help to shelter your assets, making it highly unlikely that they will be included in any care fee calculations. Although we do not recommend establishing a Lifetime Trust as a method of deliberately avoiding care home costs. This would be seen as a deliberate deprivation of assets and is unlawful. However, a Lifetime Trust can be set up for other reasons. Such as to eliminate Probate costs and to enable your estate to be administered more efficiently. In this case assets held within the Trust will not be considered for the purpose of assessing your liability for care home fees.
Around one in four adults live in a care setting. If you were to go into care, it would be important to select a setting and location that offers quality, safety and protection. A Lifetime Trust offers you more control when deciding about your care and associated later life matters.
To set up a Lifetime Trust, you will need to be fit and healthy, with no foreseeable need for care. Estate Planning Solutions endeavour to determine whether you qualify for legitimate reasons for lifetime planning. We do this at our very first meeting, before taking your instructions. Even if you don’t qualify for lifetime planning, you’re still likely to be able to undertake estate planning using a Will Trust, which still affords you some protection.
Always consult an estate planning professional for the best possible advice and guidance in regard to your options, when planning for the future.
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