Hello, I’m Tish Hanifan. When you’re making care funding decisions it’s important to seek financial advice from an adviser who is a later life specialist. That can make all the difference. But what should you expect from that adviser? We asked that question when setting up the organisation of which I’m the founder and joint chair, The Society of Later Life Advisors, SOLLA.

A good adviser should obviously have good technical knowledge, but they should also have more than that, they should have empathy and understanding to work alongside you to achieve the right outcome. And be someone in whom you can have confidence that they want to get this right for you and they’re not simply there just to earn money. That’s what the accreditation demonstrates.

Someone such as a SOLLA accredited adviser not only meets the requirements of the financial watchdogs, but has achieved a voluntary later life advisor accreditation which is designed to test their wider knowledge of facts which will make a difference to your decision, such as the benefit system, how local authority funding works, and how and when the National Health Service might fund all or some of the care. And, along with that, it demonstrates someone who understands what you’re maybe going through when making these choices, especially if you have the additional responsibility of making this on behalf of someone else, for example, with the power of attorney.

Because; and the recommendation came from a friend of mine who had done the same for his mother and he put me in touch with this specialist advisor who I thought, who was great, as far as I was concerned. They were I never felt under any pressure, they just were able to, they took the facts in terms of the expenditure and the money and the, what was invested and what could be realised and just distilled it down into a really straight forward black and white unemotional assessment of, well it will cost you this and the capital will decrease at this rate if you do nothing and it will last X, you know, it was, some might find it quite brutal, I found it quite comforting really that somebody else had looked at the figures and had reflected back to me the sort of issues that I had been considering and discussing and the and I did discuss it with my mother at times when she was obviously able to have that conversation.

And how do you feel the fact that you have a number, a contact that if you, kind of that you can call?

Oh, I think it’s reassuring and it’s reassuring because I know they can get on the computer or open the draw and my file is there and they can go, Oh yes, yes, you had tha.

Okay.

And they will call me back in as they did with this eye thing. Come in, have the tes.

Okay and they provide advice over the phone?

Yeah, yeah, advice and the advice is normally, Come in and we’ll see yo. So, it’s always, it’s always there. I know I can go in. It will get seen. They’ll do all the tests. They looked at my eye and did a scan and-, and found there wasn’t a TIA there. It was something else.

Okay, so it’s more than just getting information or advice over the phone.

You can go in and they will do all the tests that are needed and then it eliminates because I’ve had one TIA, is it another? No, it wasn’t a TIA, so it eliminates that which allowed the optic or the eye hospital to eliminate something from.

And how did you feel having that support?

Yeah, it’s really good. Yeah, it’s again, it’s that reassurance. I know I can go in and get that good advice and they would do all the tests because I assume it’s good for them as well because it’s all part of their research.

It was if one or other of you needed either part-time or eventually full-time care this is how you could move things around in order to cover what we project are the likely costs; and it was pretty realistic in terms of the cost estimates that she was using and so on. So that was reassuring, so I didn’t immediately go into blind panic mode when I knew that Graham needed to have more care than he could get at home.

There’s a wide range of equity release products available nowadays, with the providers of these plans offering many different options as well as different rates of interest and ways to repay them. And that’s why it’s best to take advice from a specialist later life financial adviser who regularly works with clients and advises them on equity release. They’ll be able to help you find the right solution. SOLLA has a later life lending advice standard which will help you to identify advisers who will be able to navigate you through all these choices and decide if equity release is right for you. A good financial adviser will help you understand the costs involved and the pitfalls as well as the benefits. Most importantly, if you’re receiving care in your own home the local authority means-testing currently disregards the value of that home. Many people take out equity release to raise some money from their home and they’re not considering using it to fund their care. However, it’s very important that you do take into account what may happen if you do need care. The money then will be assessed by the local authority when they’re looking at your eligibility for support from them.

I mean interest rates are poor, so poor at the moment, you know, what’s the point? We don’t want to gamble with the money I mean obviously we could try something to give higher returns but, you know, I don’t think we can afford to gamble with the whole world’s financial systems [laughs] seemingly, well the whole world appearing to be crazy at the moment with lots of things. It’s very difficult to make that judgement so obviously we need some sort of security with that. You know, mum has a reasonable amount in her premium bonds and hopefully [laughs] one of those will come up trumps [laughs], but who knows? That’s the only things we do. I mean we have it in a standard account with a normal bank and she has some premium bonds and that’s it, yeah, and we can’t afford, I don’t believe, to be risky with anything else. I don’t think the sums that she has are enough to warrant us going to a bank and getting significantly better interest rates or anything like that.