Is it right that some must sell their homes to pay care home costs?

A question about : Is it right that some must sell their homes to pay care home costs?

Poll started 25 Mar 2014

If someone needs to go into a care home, the value of their assets, including their home, is usually used to calculate what they pay. This doesn’t apply to couples when one is still living at home.

There are plans that only homes worth over Ј123,000 will be taken into account (currently, it’s Ј23,250). The most anyone needs to pay for care is Ј75,000 over their lifetime, plus Ј12,500 per year to cover bed and board. After that, state help kicks in.

Is it right some must sell their homes to pay care home costs?

Which of the options in this week's poll is CLOSEST to your view?

Vote in this week's poll

Did you vote? Why did you pick that option? Are you surprised at the results so far? Have your say below. To see the results from last time, click this

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Best answers:

• My opinion is not there. We should not be living long enough to need care. The houses and the jobs should be left to the younger generations. Too many abandoned houses with no one living in them because they are 'in a home'.
• personally i dont believe its as simple as the options make it here as there are several levels of care and several types of home. the basic care home cost should be covered from central funds and any health care costs funded from either n.h.s or other sources. but anything over and above that should be paid for by the individuals themselves.
• i think it unfair that someone who has worked all their life saved and brought a house should have to sell for care home fees while the person in the next chair to them who has squandered all their money on holidays , gambling and drinking and living in council rented housing has their care paid for by the government!!!
  If i knew then what I know now I would not have brought but would have stayed in rented accommodation .
• In an ideal world everyone would have their care paid for by the state. We'd also all earn a million pounds a year and live in mansions.
  Given the current limitations I think the current system is best. I can see the opposite sides view but similarly why should a child inherit a house they've done nothing to work for while the state supports their parents? In the current system a child can still inherit the house, it just means they will need to support their parents in their old age. Few are willing to do this however.
  My ideal solution would be that the state wouldn't fund anyone but I think while we live in the UK this wont happen anyway.
• Funnily enough this is very relevant as I am helping my in-laws with their finances and this is a hot topic of conversation. My father-in-law is adamant that he wants his children to inherit the value of the house he worked so hard for as well as the savings they have built up by scrimping and saving.
  However, this amount of cash would have been useful 10-20 years ago, but his offspring are now all very fortunate to be comfortable financially. Despite this he still continues to scrimp and save in order to leave an 'inheritance'. He wants the NHS or local authority to provide everything free "because I have paid my stamp" and refuses to pay for anything that he doesn't absolutely have to.
  He was utterly horrified when I explained the rules about care home funding (which may never be needed, but we were discussing all situations) and that the savings would be used and the house sold if both or the second of the pair of them need residential care.
  It seems fair to me that their assets (including home) should be used as they are 'spare'. In particular because part of the cost of residential care is to cover things you are going to pay for anyway such as gas, electricity, water, food etc. Why should you suddenly get those things free if the state/NHS paid the full care home fee when you didn't before and you can afford to pay for them?
  It also seems odd to treat a house differently to anything else - it is just an asset. Also, it is up to us as individuals (if we can afford it) to decide if we want to buy a house or not. If houses become protected assets then that discourages people to downsize to smaller properties.
  The flip-side is the equivalent aged couple without savings and paying rent. They will be still paying rent every month up to the end, whereas my in-laws paid their mortgage off 30 years ago and have been living rent-free, so no wonder they have built up more savings. The renters are not necessarily reckless spenders who have frittered it all away - although if they are - good on them. Life is for living, not scrimping - as I tell my father-in law - you can't take it with you.
• My grandfather was forced to sell his home of 25 years, the home he had shared with his late wife, in order to pay for any kind of care - not just to live in residential care. He was refused any kind of NHS nurse to visit him at home at all, and he used all of his savings paying for someone private. In the end, it came down to the last thing he had left - his home. He didn't have to leave it, he could quite easily have stayed living there but with regular home care workers visiting him daily. As a family, we lost a lot of memories from our childhood and a place where we all congregated regularly. Granddad passed away not long after leaving his home - having to move into a box room (which is essentially what they are) and leave all his familiar surroundings and possessions, and memories of his wife, ultimately killed him faster. Now as a family we don't have that central hub we used to gather together in, we've started to break apart. Of course I recognise there are other options and causes of this - but my granddad worked hard his whole life. He never claimed any benefits, never claimed job seekers, was never a burden on the NHS and never asked the state for anything. He worked hard to support his family, and to provide a good home for his children and grandchildren, paid his taxes and some. It was not fair for him to have to give everything up at the end, when if he had had nothing all along and been on benefits all his life he would have had all the care he needed for free.
  If our Government are trying to encourage society to work hard, to aim high and to move away from claiming benefits etc - then the best way to go surely is to change how this care is paid for and assessed. The current system acts as a deterrent to owning your own home in retirement, or making any effort to invest or make sure you are comfortable. Making it so that only other assets are included, or allowing people to get the NHS care they need and sell the property later to pay for it, or having a more realistic means test threshold. Let's face it, the majority of properties in this country cost well over Ј250,000 which will include the majority of home-owners by the time my generation comes to retirement. Someone who owns a Ј250k home is NOT wealthy. Look at the South East or London, you're lucky to get a flipping studio for that. Someone who has a home worth Ј1m is probably someone who has other assets - so go after the other assets. Liquidate the yacht, the cars, the investments, the bullion, the jewellery - whatever. The home is the most fundamental element of anybody's life - and nobody should be forced to give up their home in this way.
  And what is wrong with having something to hand over to your children? Most of us these days have no hope in hell of getting on the property ladder without our parents' financial help. The remainder of the money from my granddad's house was distributed in the will, and I got enough to have a small deposit on a property. Without it I'd still be saving in my 40s. So many other people I talk to who have just bought a property were in the same position - inherited funds. Whilst those who are not lucky enough to have this may think we have a sense of entitlement about it - we don't, we know how lucky we are, and we certainly would prefer to have come by the money another way, but the property market is out of control as it is - increasing property inheritance is potentially a way to calm things down and ensure more people can get on to the ladder in future generations.
• I think that it's necessary to consider the alternative before deciding this. Suppose someone has assets in a house of Ј200000. They go into a nursing home and the cost comes to Ј150000 over the rest of their life They leave Ј50000.
  Now say that the Government pays Ј50000 of the care fees. That person now leaves Ј100000. BUT effectively the Government (i.e. taxpayers) is giving Ј50000 of that money to the inheritors. Why should I, as a taxpayer, pay that person's inheritors Ј50000? Where is the fairness in that?
• Could we please get rid of this cliche about people who are poor in old age having deliberately squandered all they had on booze/fags/holidays etc? There may be a few like that but the vast majority of people, particularly of the older generation, have worked hard all their lives and done the best they can with what they could earn. If they were in low paid jobs, perhaps they couldn't afford to save or buy a house. That doesn't make them profligate. We need binmen and shop workers and bottom wipers and cleaners and they work just as hard for their low wages and pay taxes just like higher earners. It makes me so mad when I see this stereotyping. Having a house and savings does not make you a better person than someone who doesn't have those things, and in a civilised first world country it is right that nobody should be abandoned in their old age. The basic system is that if you can pay for care, you do, and rightly so. A house is basically cash in the form of bricks and mortar. If you don't need it any more because you are living elsewhere, then of course it should go to pay for that care. If the heirs don't like that, then they can always take the old person in and care for them. And before I'm accused of not knowing what I'm talking about, we are currently selling my mother's ex-council house to pay for her Ј1k a week dementia care. It's just the way the cookie crumbles. She's lived to be 88, she doesn't know what day of the week it is, she needs care, she has the money in the form of a house. Simple. You can't have it both ways.
• And as for 'paid your stamp' - how much did you pay? Certainly not Ј1000 a week, and where did it say you were entitled to luxury care for years on that? It's for the NHS and national INSURANCE, ie if you lose your job or become I'll or disabled, you won't starve. I'm old enough to have been working in the very early 70s and I know how little I paid, by modern standards. I earned Ј8 a week as a 16-yo library assistant and NI was about 40p. Even if that had been put in a box with my name on it and kept for me, it wouldn't cover much. The stamp argument just doesn't hold up, however much some would like it to.
• To be honest I think the question of whether current older people who do not have a home have 'squandered' their money is slightly irrelevant. However this will become relevant in the future. My grandparents generation were (on the whole) sensible and careful with money. I hate to say it but my generation and younger seem to have an overwhelming sense of entitlement to getting anything without working for it and living well beyond their means.
  I know that this is generalising and there are many many people who have not been able to get on the housing ladder due to prices spiralling upwards (me included). But when I do finally get that house it will be mine! If I choose to leave it to my family, some cats or a random stranger that should be up to me. In the hopefully unlikely scenario I live to a time where I need to be in a care home I don't see why me working hard and saving should mean my family suffers when the dosser in the bed next to me spent all their money and gets everything for free.
  What you did with your money to get into a situation where you have no assets should be taken into consideration. Having no assets because you had a low paid job is one thing. Having no assets because you made the choice to live it up is quite another.
• But that argument is exactly like saying, I earn Ј200 a week but someone else should pay for my food and mortgage/rent, because I earned that money and it's mine and if I want to give it to the dogs' home I should be able to. The point as I see it is, the country/taxpayers cannot afford to fund everyone's care in old age. Some will be lucky and not need it. Those who do need it won't be living in the house any more, and why should taxpayers pay for that person to keep an empty, unneeded house? Heirs are neither here nor there. Nobody is entitled to an inheritance. If things pan out in a lucky way so they get one, great. If the person who owns the stuff needs it for themselves, well, it's theirs. If the person owning the goods feels that their heirs' needs are greater than theirs, they can struggle on alone. If the heirs want the house that much,they can care for the old person. There is no compulsion for anyone to be in a care home, but if it's what suits people, then they can't expect to have the house as well. And as for investigating how people managed their money 40 or 50 years ago....can you imagine how that would go down?!!! It's like the cries to Bring Back The Cane that you see all over certain newspapers. What the ones asking for it mean is, do it to other people but not me or my kids. Cane the ones who aren't like my kids, investigate the money management of those I think are wasters, but if anyone dares to cane my kids or ask me for paperwork from 1975 there will be hell to pay.
  In practice, what happens is, if you have money, you get to choose and probably end up in a nice luxurious Ј1k a week private care home where you or your relatives call the shots and where if you're not happy you can easily move somewhere else. If you rely on the local authority, you get placed somewhere that they can afford. It may be very nice, it may not be so good. But you don't get to pick and choose. Believe me, having money makes it much easier and usually better and if anyone is that worried that they will be sitting in all their thrifty glory next to some low-class smug waster in their luxury private care home, they probably don't need to worry.
• I think owning an empty home for no other reason than 'it's yours' and refusing to pay for care you can afford is the definition of entitlement.
  I think there should be some kind of grace period. Some people only want to go into a home on the condition that they could change their mind and go back. So for some number of weeks or months they should not have to sell their home. But after that? It is so, so entitled to think you deserve two homes, or for children to think they deserve a big inheritance, and 'suffer' if they don't get it.
• I'm afraid it's another nonsense poll, confusing two quite different issues.
  The ideal is Option 4, ie in an Ideal World, everyone's care and board should be covered by the taxpayer. But that's a political funding decision that's still a very long way from being possible.
  In today's Read World, Option 1 is the only realistic answer; we can't have people hanging onto houses they are never going to live in again just so that they can pass them on to their beneficiaries, who will mostly sell them anyway. A house is no difference from any other asset.
• I notice that the most popular option is that the nhs should pay for all care
  .While this is great in theory the money simply isn't there. With an ever ageing population who have increasingly complex needs, the cost of care is going up and up. Short of going to a Scandinavian style 70% tax rate I just don't see how you'd raise enough in taxes to pay for it all.
• The one thing that bothers me the most and no one has mentioned this so far, is the cost of care and nursing homes in the UK.
  They are ridiculously expensive.
  It does not cost the amount charged to keep someone in one of these small rooms.
  Care homes have one nurse and that's it. The remainder of the staff are low paid, usually foreign, employees on minimum wage.
  The owners of these homes are ripping the elderly off and that is what infuriates me. It is daylight robbery.
  My mum is 88, has had Alzheimer's for 15 years and has been in 4 different care homes. They have cost from Ј975 per week to Ј575.
  When she first went in the last care home it was Ј525 per week, in 3 years it went up Ј100 per week.
  She needed a new chair as she couldn't sit up properly and kept sliding out of it onto the floor and they told me they didn't provide that type, I'd have to pay for one?!
  She's now just a bag of skin and bones - she hasn't been given decent food in any of the homes she's been in, it's all cheap, processed rubbish and very little of it. For this she is paying a fortune.
  I want this made illegal. People are being charged far too high a price in these care homes, it's a total rip off and we should not allow this situation to continue.
• I worked for 44 years before retiring. I always believed that it was my National Insurance contributions that would provide for a care home place should I need one - not Income Tax.
  NI contributions were far higher when I was younger than they are now.
  A care home place is not something anyone should give me but a service for which I, along with anyone else who paid NI Contributions, has already paid.
  If the Government has mis-appropriated the funds it collected from me for care home fees if needed, why should I pay again?
  What would happen to a private Insurance Company if they used everyone's premiums for something else and then said they couldn't pay out when you made a claim?
  Shame on the Government.