Paying for social care (older people)

I accept the inevitability of it, but there is a, it seems to me there is a dreadful unfairness in that we have been prudent over the years and I suppose at one time if you take our total estate you might say that we’re modestly rich this, our two fees together is £2,500 a month even if you’re modestly rich it runs down at quite a speed, yeah, yeah.

The income, her income streams, which was her own, her own state pension and an occupational pension of my father’s so it was a widow’s pension, and she also had attendance allowance. So they were her three forms of income and then details of her investments at the time.

And also the fact that, like, my father has a very good pension, plus the government pension, plus attendance allowance, and my mum has private pension but it’s tiny compared to my father’s. Her government pension is less than my father gets, her attendance allowance is the same. But her care fees are exactly the same so there’s a huge imbalance of how much you need for each person.

Yeah, we thought, you know, what if he lives to be a hundred, you know, we will have to, we don’t want to move him. So in fact the, his care home have been extremely helpful in, from the moment he moved in up until; well they’re always helpful actually. But they, when he moved in they explained all the various allowances that he was eligible for and so we did all of that, and they were quite they were very helpful in sort of talking us through the pros and cons from their point of view of a what’s it called? It is called a care, a lifetime care plan; it’s an, I think it’s an annuity is it?

And basically deferred payment is like mortgage you agree for the local authority to put a charge over your property and they will then contribute to your care or your care home and the care costs over and above your income. So, for example, you’re in a care home that costs 1000 pounds and you were paying 250 pound a week from your income, the 750 pound could be offset against your property, your asset, through a deferred payment agreement.

We had Power of Attorney so myself and one of my sisters tends to manage mum’s account. So obviously mum had started to pay from her savings; at the same time obviously we, mum had left her home, her flat that she owned here in [town], and we put that on the market to sell that and eventually, after a few months, that sold so that topped up her savings and we’re now funding mum. Obviously when she went from residential to nursing care the fund the fees increased at that stage so that was a bit of a blow again but mum’s fees are currently met out of her savings.

She had a lot of pensions, she’d done a lot of investing, she had ISAs coming out of her ears, and we could make up about 80% of what was needed monthly. So, ah, when we sold the house, I put it into something and took an income out of it, and that covered it for the first 2 or 3 years – 4 years, in fact. We then got to the point where I needed to activate her final lump sum that she had, that we’d been just reinvesting and reinvesting, so the money had grown a little bit, to try and kind of index-link it so to speak, and I’d just sent off to have that turned into income when she died.

You’re not really planning to sell your father’s house any time soon?

No. I don’t want to. He, he says, “Why don’t we just sell the house?” And so, and I’ve said to him, “Look, well, I’ve set up a business now.” So there’s a partnership, me and my dad that administer that house as a holiday let. So with his permission last year I did some work on the house, the first work that’s been done in forty years, to get it up to a standard where we could rent it. Originally I was thinking of renting it to a family and then I thought about holiday let, because then we can use it, dad could go down there; now, of course, dad can’t go down there because he can’t walk anymore. So we set up a partnership that is a, well hasn’t been going a year yet but we’ll see what happens.

That sounds like a good idea.

Yeah, a friend of mine advised me to do that; he said, “Well why don’t you let it? Because otherwise, you know, it’s just going to…”

A lot of work though, you’ve got to be on hand.

I was down for about three months getting that done, yeah.

And, and I suppose each week that it’s let out you’ve got to be sort of…

It’s been, it’s been let out as a holiday let since May last year and up till now [touching wood] it’s been pretty good, but then this virus has kicked in and we don’t know what’s going to happen now.