Cost of Living Crisis

[Dawson Park Boy]

8 hours ago, Day of the Lords said:

Care homes aren't quite as straightforward though. It's basically your new house with added nursing care, meals etc. Given the previous hotly contested debates over how pay rises etc etc are going to be funded, they'd be chicken feed compared to taking residential care out of the hands of private entities and making it all free. 

Personally I feel increased taxes to fund pay rises for people suffering from a massive cost of living crisis aren't quite as hard a sell as tax rises to pay for free residential care for Mrs Smith so that her three children can squabble over who gets the £500,000 house she's just moved out of. 

 

I think I might just about agree with you on that one.

Probably, a first and likely the last.

[Dawson Park Boy]

10 hours ago, BFTD said:

On DPB's posts about healthcare, there's always a missing asterisk followed by "for the percentage of people who are able to afford it".

Not that he wants to deny healthcare to people at the bottom of society, you understand. He just thinks it should be considered. Total coincidence that he mentions paying twice for his healthcare every time, as though he thinks he'd personally make any worthwhile savings if the NHS didn't exist.

You make fun of my views on private healthcare but the situation within the NHS, especially for elderly people, is now becoming past a joke. Forget about my going private for cataract surgery but we have friends, a couple in their eighties, who are totally constrained as to what they can do due to the woman being crippled by a diseased hip.She had surgery on one a few years ago on the NHS which improved her mobility but now the other one requires attention. She has been quoted a couple of years but, at 80 plus, can she wait that long?

She has now got an appointment privately with the surgeon who she had under the NHS to start the ball rolling for a private operation at the Murrayfield.

These people are not particularly well off and the £20k will take a big chunk of their savings but they consider it to be worth it for the quality of life the op. hopefully will bring.

There’s the dilemna.

Is it wrong? Should she suffer in silence or should she take matters into her own hands?

Its easy to moralise when you are not confronted with the reality of painful twilight years.

[Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo]

12 hours ago, BILmac1967 said:

A big part of this argument is that people with dementia/ younger people with disabilities were looked after by their own families in the 1960's through the 70's but that changed as we became more materialistic, now we dump them on the NHS / "the state" in general.

The people I grew up with as "socialists" now also want to have savings as well as keeping property,

now we all rage when the gov. can't afford everything.

That's quite a bold statement.

[Clown Job]

 

[Dawson Park Boy]

38 minutes ago, Clown Job said:

 

A case of stating ‘the bleeding obvious’.

Actually, I would have thought the gap between the low income and high income homes would have been greater.

[BFTD]

DPB ranting on again without actually refuting anything that was said  

[Benjamin_Nevis]

22 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

BTW, I'm pretty sure that Mrs Smith can avoid all of these problems by putting her kids on the house deeds and then surviving another 7 years. That way she gets to keep her house and gets free care. Maybe some legal eagles on here can correct me if I'm wrong.

Not sure tbh. I am fairly sure you couldn't dispose of an asset within 6 years prior of signing up for a Care Home. Thankfully there's a separate team that deals with this stuff and I don't have to get within a 10 foot bargepole of it. Mainstream debt and benefit work is mental enough thank you very much 

[carpetmonster]

3 hours ago, oaksoft said:

It's 7 years, not 6, but yeah, I'm not completely certain about the whole thing either.

I know people who've done that for their kids. No idea whether it worked or not. It might have been an expensive waste of time (about £2k I think).

ETA. I'm not talking about her necessarily requiring care within the 7 years period.

I don’t think putting the kids directly on the deeds works as far as shielding it goes; I think you can set up a trust and put the house into it with the kids (or whoever else) being the beneficiaries. Bloke who set up our mortgage explained it to me but given I was 28 and childless I wasn’t paying huge amounts of attention. I’m pretty sure there needs to be a dissociative step taken tho, and that’s one way of doing it. 

Edited November 16, 2022 by carpetmonster

[strichener]

2 hours ago, carpetmonster said:

I don’t think putting the kids directly on the deeds works as far as shielding it goes; I think you can set up a trust and put the house into it with the kids (or whoever else) being the beneficiaries. Bloke who set up our mortgage explained it to me but given I was 28 and childless I wasn’t paying huge amounts of attention. I’m pretty sure there needs to be a dissociative step taken tho, and that’s one way of doing it. 

Both of these avoidance schemes can be challenged as deliberate deprivation of assets.

[strichener]

3 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

As far as I understand it, and via Age UK website, the authorities must prove that you knew you were going to need care when disposing of the asset. If you hand those assets over when you are fit and healthy it wouldn’t be reasonable for the authority to conclude that. and you can challenge their assessment.

Its all about timing.

So when are you putting your house into a trust?

[parsforlife]

Why the f**k do trust funds actually exist?   Most tax avoidance(I’d say dodging but lawyers love to think their schemes are moral) have some form of legitimate purpose, trust funds don’t seem to have any purpose beyond helping rich c***s dodge tax.

[moses1924]

could you not sell the house to your children, then the asset belongs to them?

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

1 hour ago, oaksoft said:

Yes but you then have the cash from the sale to dispose of.

If you’re mortgage free is there any reason you cant say sell your house to your kid for £5?

[Aufc]

I always find it funny that some people can work all their days and pay taxes and have to pay for their care whilst some people can never work and get their care paid for

[Billy Jean King]

I won’t need to do that as I won’t be going into a social care system riddled with abusive practices.
When my time is up, I’ll be ending things on my own terms either through Switzerland or taking all the insulin I can get access to.
I have no intention of clinging on to what would be a shell of a life like a limpet. One reason why I try to make sure I live each day doing things I enjoy while I can.

One reason why I try to make sure I live each day doing things I enjoy while I can.


Christ you are easily pleased !!!

[DA Baracus]

So, how badly are we getting fucked today?

[Paco]

So, how badly are we getting fucked today?

The Times has basically published the full thing already. Energy price cap moving to £3k on average with the grants scrapped, so an average annual increase of £900 in April. This is what drives essentially all of the UK’s inflation, and we’re still doing very little to sort it. For context the average bill on the price cap in March 2022 was £1,277, and most people weren’t even on the price cap. £1,800 in a year.

Income tax rates all frozen for five years, so big chunks of those pay rises will be going straight back to HMRC. Council tax can be raised 5% rather than 3% as currently, which councils will almost definitely do as their budgets are getting cut.

That looks like about it for the ‘man in the street’. Lovely stuff.

[DA Baracus]

16 minutes ago, Paco said:

The Times has basically published the full thing already. Energy price cap moving to £3k on average with the grants scrapped, so an average annual increase of £900 in April. This is what drives essentially all of the UK’s inflation, and we’re still doing very little to sort it. For context the average bill on the price cap in March 2022 was £1,277, and most people weren’t even on the price cap. £1,800 in a year.

Income tax rates all frozen for five years, so big chunks of those pay rises will be going straight back to HMRC. Council tax can be raised 5% rather than 3% as currently, which councils will almost definitely do as their budgets are getting cut.

That looks like about it for the ‘man in the street’. Lovely stuff.

How can they expect folk to cope with the energy cost rises? Bearing in mind that said costs will probably never go down, and if they do it will only be a little bit? That's in the context of everything else being more expensive, and will get even more expensive once the energy costs rise as companies will, as always, punt increases costs on to the customers. 

Some of those companies will be making record profits, again, but others will be going under when their energy costs go mental. Lots of businesses will be lost forever. People will have less cash to spend so surely this means more recession, which locks in the cycle of prices going up everywhere again. Is this now some sort of perpetual cycle that the UK cannot stop?

[vikingTON]

A recession causes falling not rising prices. 

[Billy Jean King]

Don't forget a rise in the minimum wage.....if you are over 23 !!!

This totally boils my piss. How can anyone think that anyone working aged 18-22 can live on less than those 23 and over. It's bat shit crazy stuff.