@Jaded'n'faded this is a real insight. Thank you. We know we will be contemplating this fairly soon.So true.
All my life, whenever I threw my hands up and declared, 'It's not fair!' my mother would always reply, 'No one ever said life is fair. Get used to it.'
Mum paid for her care because she had ample funds and that's fair enough. But it's not fair she paid so much more for her room than the LA were paying for the residents they funded. Mum paid tax and NI all her life (and she always worked apart from 5 years when my brother and I were very young.) So she paid for her own care, paid towards the care of other through taxes then got shafted again paying the higher fees at the care home. Should she have been made to pay again? No.
But maybe I should take the blame as I chose the CH. Back then I didn't have a clue about funding or how it worked. When I did discover the truth, the manager was quite open with me about how much more my mother was paying because the LA don't pay enough so they charged private residents more to make up the shortfall. This only happens in homes that take both private and LA funded residents. I should have chosen a fully private home for her. But how was I to know about this injustice? This is probably the one piece of advice I'd pass on to anyone comtemplating a self-funded move into care for their loved one.
If the home you choose when self-funding doesn’t take LA funded people, presumably that means our Mum would have to be moved OR continue to pay top-up contributions once she falls below the £23,500 threshold?