What To Do When Your Parents Can't Live At Home Anymore

What To Do When Your Parents Can’t Live At Home Anymore

Today I’m talking about what happens when one of your parents, or it doesn’t have to be a parent, it can just be someone that you care for, can no longer live at home.

You have either had a situation where they’ve gone into hospital from an injury, it’s often a fall, and then the medical staff are saying that your parent, friend, aunt, or uncle can’t go home. What do we need to do?

We need to consider a whole lot of options and also keep the person themselves informed as well.

If they still have mental capacity, it’s actually their decision, so you can’t take the decision out of their hands. In fact, unless you have a power of attorney, you don’t have that ability to make the decision even if the person has lost capacity. So what do we do?

Hopefully the hospital or whomever has been talking with you or assessing your parent has tried to or started to set up for you an aged care assessment. If you haven’t had one already, if you’ve got an elderly parent or someone that you are caring about is at home at the moment and going fairly well, it wouldn’t hurt to get them into the system by having an aged care assessment at that point as well. An aged care assessment assesses the level of care that they require. Of course, if they are at home and they’re doing okay, then the level of care will be low. They don’t need to go into a care facility.

However, having the aged care assessment will potentially open up other services that they might be able to have, like some meals from home, some home help, cleaning, or some money to upgrade railing and things in the house to make it a bit safer. It’s quite useful to have an aged care assessment earlier rather than later, but you’re going to need your aged care assessment to be able to get into a facility.

Part of the aged care assessment, if you’re looking at going into some kind of aged care home, involves an assessment of the assets and finances of the person as well. If the person is going into what we used to call a low-care facility or even a high-care facility, there’s different ways that fees are charged. There is a daily rate that needs to be charged, and then there’s often the accommodation component. The accommodation component can be paid as a lump sum. It’s often held then, and that money comes back to the estate after the person either passes away or moves into a different facility.

That is what we used to call a bond. It’s now called RAD, a refundable aged care deposit, so that the aged care facility invests that and uses some of the income of the investment to help pay for the care of the person. Then the daily care fee also has to be paid on top of a rate for the accommodation component.

Now, if you can’t quite raise enough money for the deposit, you can pay a part deposit and then pay part as a daily rate, as an additional rate on top, so your daily rate can be comprised then of the care as well as part accommodation. Or if you can’t raise the lump sum at all, it can all be just a daily rate that’s being paid, and that’s often capped. I can’t remember what the cap was, but I think the cap, at one point, was about $56,000 or so. The person would pay a daily rate up until they got to that, depending on how many years they were there, and then their fees would lower because they’d paid up to the cap.

Then there’s many types of facilities, and it depends on how much the deposit is to assess to go into various facilities.

Some that are government-funded and run are lower, of course, and then there are private ones that can charge quite a high deposit. I believe that they’re also tapped at what they can charge as a deposit as well, so it’s a whole lot of things to assess, and you might need a financial planner to help with all that. There are financial planners that actually specialize in aged care, so if you want some contacts, let us know.

The other things around doing that financial assessment is, if one of your parents has to go into care and the other can stay at home, the timing of them going into care can be really crucial in terms of the amount that they need to pay. So really getting some advice in that aspect can be helpful, primarily because if one of them goes into care and there’s still someone living in the house as their principal place of residence, then quite often that is not assessed as an asset. So they can be assessed as paying a lower amount to go into care, so the timing can be quite important.

The other thing to consider as well, then, is how you’re going to raise the money.

A lot of that generation are quite reluctant to have their house sold because huge sentimental value and because they see it as their biggest asset, they don’t necessarily understand that the RAD comes back to the family, so it’s not like the proceeds of the sale just disappear. And they quite often think that the family actually wants to keep their house, but that’s probably not the case, so having that conversation is worthwhile as well.

The other thing to consider is a granny flat arrangement.

If you don’t want your family member or friend to go straight into aged care, but they just need someone around more often, then a granny flat arrangement might be the way to go. It’s an arrangement that Centrelink recognizes. Again, it would involve the sale of the person’s house and then the payment of a lump sum of money to yourself if they were moving in with you for either a independent unit or a granny flat to be built out the back, or even just for improvements to the current house such that they’ve got some independent living within the house itself. Centrelink recognizes that it’s a payment to you for the care of that person. They don’t consider it to be a gift, and hence the elderly person won’t be penalized by Centrelink for doing that if that was a concern.

So there you are. A whole lot of things to consider when someone is looking at having to stay in care and not come home.

If we can help you in any way, mainly around doing powers of attorney, that’s our role. We can put you in touch with financial planners if you need to, or if you’re looking at a granny flat arrangement, we can also formalize that, so Centrelink approves it.

What To Do When Your Parents Can’t Live At Home Anymore