Blog - Respect Wills

Avoiding Care fees and why you might not want to.

It’s getting festive out there! The trees are popping up, lights beginning to twinkle and money flying out of people’s hands at an alarming rate. For a lot of people it’s not really the time to be thinking about Wills. Possibly it’s also the last subject people want to be reading about over a nice …

Making Advance Healthcare Decisions.

Making Advance Healthcare Decisions is becoming more common. I spend a lot of time talking about death, dying or loss of capacity with my clients. One thing has become really clear which is that not many of us want to linger. It is rare for me to meet with someone who hopes for a long …

For far too long now certain firms have been profiteering out of grieving people during the most difficult times of their lives. Back in the day, probate certainly was a hideous process with lots of paperwork going backwards and forwards, causing delays and administrative nightmares. Fast forward to the technical age and processes have become …

Planning for Later Life: A Delicate Balance

There are many issues to consider in later life planning but having the right documents in place definitely helps. With an increase in diagnosed dementia it is important that early consideration is given to planning as mental capacity is required for legal documents to be valid. Protecting your home and your loved ones needs careful thought.

Can’t I just give my home to my children now?

There are two issues here, one is inheritance tax and one is care fees. From an inheritance tax point of view you can gift your house to your children but you would have to live 7 years before this would mean no inheritance tax was due on the gift if you die. However, this just isn’t viable for most people as you cannot retain a benefit from the property, meaning you cannot continue to live in it after you have given it away, unless you pay a full market rent.

From the point of view of care fees, the Local Authority will invariably see this as intentional deprivation of assets and will assess you as if you still own the property.

Then how can I protect against care fees?

In short, you can’t completely. However, you can certainly improve the situation.

Tools to help families with practical considerations.

Half a million women in the UK are currently living with dementia. A slightly smaller number of men. Many of these have families whose lives are affected dramatically by the need to care for their relatives. Although dementia affects more women than men, it doesn’t particularly discriminate. Certainly not on the grounds of background, education, lifestyle or status (alzheimer’s research UK).

Dementia is a really sensitive subject, partly because of the fear it instils in many of us, whether we have seen the suffering first hand or not.

A new research project is looking for volunteers, those currently well and those suffering from dementia can join the research project and help in the search for better treatments and ultimately a cure.