Wills - leaving to children or grandchildren?

annsixty, if you are still living in the family home when your husband needs care it will be disregarded when calculating his capital. Half of his pension income will also be disregarded as he still has a duty to maintain you and contribute towards your costs even if he is in care. Only other capital in his own name or half of joint investments totalling more than the statutory limit where you live will be "in play". Once his capital has gone down to the minimum limit all he will have to pay is half of his pension less the personal allowance (around £23 a week for toiletries, haircuts etc.). The local authority should then top this up to their published amount.

The local authority cannot touch your savings in your own name, but some have been known to use emotional blackmail to get spouses to "voluntarily" top up fees to get a nicer room or better placement.

It sounds as if it is "foreseeable" your husband needs care so you cannot use trusts while you are both alive, but you could still do some planning for post death using Wills.

Thank you iaincam for that reassurance. It has been very concerning to me as H has Alzheimer's and we had made wills before his diagnosis and I knew that we could not change from joint tenants to tenants in common after his diagnosis.

I had understood that the LA could take a charge on 50% of the property if it is co-owned with a spouse and one partner has to go into long-term care.

Is this no longer true, iaincam?

It is possible to effect a unilateral severance of tenancy to create a tenancy in common even if your spouse has lost capacity, the problem is while you can make a new Will, they can't.
The rules on disregarding property are to be found in Charging for Residential Accommodation Guide (CRAG) gov.wales/docs/dhss/publications/150427crag2015en.pdf which hasn't altered for years, at 7.003 it says where a resident no longer occupies their home its value it is still disregarded for capital purposes if it is occupied "in whole or in part" by a partner or a relative aged over 60 or who is incapacitated. I have included a link for the Welsh version, but it holds for England as well.

You are very kind to give us this info iaincam I will get advice after Christmas. Thank you.

Because of family estrangement, MIL has said she doesn't want my two daughters to receive anything from her estate, so everything my OH has comes to me, but I've just set up my will that a fixed sum from my estate goes into trust to be divided equally between any GC, with my son as administrator. Unless the girls meet him in person, proving the existence of their children within 5 years of my death, the trust fund reverts to any children he may have - if none, he inherits everything. The reason for this stipulation is to try to rebuild bridges between the 3 siblings, but he has already said that since he will be relatively comfortably off, even if the girls don't choose to allow their children to benefit, he will try to trace all grands and split their money between them. Wish things weren't bitter and acrimonious, but don't know what else I can do in the circumstances?

Re the situation about DH inheriting. If your SIL is a b***, and you want to ensure that he cant get his hands on your estate, I would advise leaving a trust for daughter/grandchildren, which she/they could claim on divorce, widowhood or other coming of age. Or leave to another family member whom you trust to protect her/their interests. I accept that it can be a serious problem, but there is probably a way round it. Of course, if he is a nice lad, the situation probably shouldn't cause concern.

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Reported.

I haven't read all the posts here, but just want to take a moment to jump in and say a few things. For now, DH and I have reciprocal wills, where each lives our estate to the other and then the second one leaves it in equal amounts to each DD. We trust them to use/leave money to our GC as they see fit. Anything we want to give to the GC, specifically (money for college and such), we're doing now, while we're alive.

In fact, like some of you here, we're gradually giving out money to our DDs while we're living rather than have them "wait till we die" for everything. I'm more into this than DH who worries more that we may not be holding on to enough for ourselves. So we compromise on the amounts.

We also have some accounts in trust for our DDs that will go straight to them (if we haven't given out the money already or it hasn't gone to nursing care), also divided equally. If I outlive DH, I'm thinking of fixing it so that most of my estate, however small, is handled this way. Then not too much will have to go through a will.

LynnC, I hope this hasn't already been said (as I mentioned, I haven't read all the posts), but as much as I feel for your son, I don't think it's that unusual that your XH's new wife got the larger share of XH's estate. If XH wanted your son to get more of it, he could/should have made provisions for that. I'm so sorry that he didn't. Nor do I think that speculating about what he'll get from his GF was fair - who knows what can happen? And, IMO, it was kind of cruel to make your son his executor and then leave him so little. Your X probably didn't mean to be cruel and didn't think he was cuz of GF's money and so forth. But still, I think it was unfair and I'm so very sorry.