How can I protect my estate from care home fees?

If you need long term care in the future, you will be assessed to determine whether or not you will be entitled to funded care. If you are not eligible, you will then be means-tested to determine your ability to pay part or all of your fees from the assets that you own. If your estate is in excess of £23,250 at the time of the assessment, you will be liable to pay full fees. These can be in excess of £1,000 per week, depending on the level of care needed.

Around 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men over the age of 65 will end up needing to spend time in care, so it’s an important consideration to make when you have worked so hard for so long, to build up the assets that you own.

The good news is that there are a few different options that you may want to consider at the time of writing your Will that can help to protect your hard-earned assets from potential care home fees in the future.

Most people in the UK (around 90%) will purchase their properties as ‘joint tenants’, meaning that they own 100% of the property equally between them. This essentially means that on first death, the surviving partner will then own 100% of the property. You may or may not know that there is another form of property ownership, called ‘tenants in common’. Rather than owning the whole property equally, tenants in common own an agreed percentage of a property each (i.e. 50/50 or 60/40 etc). This is commonly used when one partner puts down a larger deposit on a property and makes larger contributions towards the property, and they would like that reflected in the ownership of the property to protect their share should the relationship break down in the future.

Being tenants in common, rather than joint tenants, means that you own a specified share in a property, which can pass to your chosen beneficiaries according to the terms of your Will. By adding a trust element to your Will, your surviving spouse can continue to benefit from your share of the property after you’ve passed away, without actually owning it. Assets placed into trust no longer make up part of the estate for care fee means testing purposes, protecting them from care home fees for your chosen beneficiaries.

It is vital that you seek advice from an Estate Planning professional if you are looking to protect your assets from care fees. Get in touch today.