Long-term care

A specialism, not an afterthought

Many advice firms treat long-term care as a footnote. We do not, because the sums involved are large, the rules are genuinely complicated, and the people making the decisions are often doing so on behalf of a parent while holding down a job.

Care is also the point where several things you have spent decades building come under pressure at once: the house, the pension, the money you intended to pass on. Getting the funding right protects more than just the person receiving care.

What we help with

• Working out what care will actually cost in your area, for the level of care needed, and how that is likely to change.
• Local authority means testing. What counts as capital, where the thresholds sit, when the value of a home is included and when it is disregarded.
• NHS continuing healthcare and funded nursing care. Whether there is a case to be made, and what to do if an assessment has gone against you.
• Funding from what you already hold, and in what order to draw on it, since the sequence affects both tax and how long the money lasts.
• Immediate needs annuities, where an insurer takes on the risk of care costs continuing for longer than expected. These are specialist products and they suit some situations and not others.
• Deferred payment agreements and the other options for meeting fees without an immediate sale of a property.

On protecting assets from care fees

This is the question we are asked most, so it is worth being straight about it.

There are legitimate ways to plan, and they usually involve doing things early, for reasons that stand up on their own. There are also arrangements marketed as ways to shelter a home from assessment which do not work. Local authorities can look back at disposals without a fixed time limit and can treat a deliberate one as though you still held the asset.

We will tell you which category something falls into. If you have already been advised to do something along these lines, bring the paperwork and we will look at it with you.

Where care meets everything else

Care funding rarely stays in its own box. It touches inheritance tax, since money spent on care is money not in your estate, and estate planning, since powers of attorney and property ownership both matter here. It also touches pensions, because pension income is usually the first thing assessed.