What is a financial assessment?

This page covers:
• What a local council financial assessment is
• Reasons why people had a financial assessment or not
• What’s included in a financial assessment

A financial assessment is where the local council works out whether they will contribute towards someone’s care or if that person should pay for it themselves. If a person is assessed as needing to pay for all their own care, they are called a ‘self-funder’.

Leigh felt her foster son’s social transition ‘could have gone quicker’ if it wasn’t for her insisting on slowing things down.

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So in that sense, the whole transition thing happened quite quickly, the whole process. Did you feel that?

I think it could have gone quicker. It could have gone quicker. And that was me being more insistent on him just slowing down and taking a breath and making sure of certain things before he did it. I know, in my heart of hearts he is who he is and he’s always gonna be who he is, you know. Even though we have conversations, the door is always open. He’s never going to go back. He was never happy. He would never fitted. He never was a female.

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Do I have to have a financial assessment?

Before a financial assessment can be carried out, the local council will do a needs assessment to see what level of care is needed. See more about this in What is a needs assessment. Some people we spoke to said they knew they would be paying for all their care themselves so didn’t see the point of going through the assessment process.

Teresa had been part of a group of volunteers to try out a planned subproject within her birth cohort study. She found it tiring and unpleasant in some ways, but also thinks the research would be interesting.

Gender Female

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And they took us round because where, where this, where we had the meeting in the university building they’ve got other resources nearby, very, very well equipped and they took us all through them and showed us, and they showed us the tests and they did some of the tests. You would think, you know, you would have hoped to be alert to do them, they’re going to be interesting to do but I think it will be also quite tiring, three days.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also a bit stressful because frankly it’s not great fun being mauled around really and they will be taking lots of blood tests. I mean they made it very clear that, you know, you’ll start off by not having breakfast and then when you did eat then they would actually take a blood test before, they would take a blood test in the middle and I mean that’s not great when you’ve got some vampire sort of hanging around you while you eat [laughter]. but it’s, I think it’s a small price to pay really because it really is important that information is passed on and it’s also really fascinating.

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What does the financial assessment look at?

The assessment will look at income, savings, shares and other assets counted as capital. If the person receiving care is living at home, the financial assessment will not include the value of the home.

Jenny, a senior researcher, explains why it is often a long time before findings can be drawn out of a cohort study and shared with others.

Gender Female

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So, this is one of the downsides of being a participant in a cohort study, is that if it’s long term health outcomes it’s going to be a long time before you hear anything. Part of the reason for this is the outcomes are actually not occurring for many years, but another part is that you can’t really feedback too much to the patients until they’ve had, until the paper, until the work has been published and seen by the scientific community and approved by a journal. So that can take a long, long time.

We do try to give newsletters saying, you know, feeding back that participation is, the participants contribution is really valuable and we value it and we want them to keep going. And then obviously when we do have results that are published, we’ll try and present those in a format which is meaningful to the participants, the study participants so that they understand exactly what we have done and why we have done it.

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As Susan says, if a person paying for care has a home that is left empty, the value of the property will be counted as capital. But if they have a spouse or partner who remains living in the home, the value of the property is not counted. Margaret’s financial assessment for her husband did not include the house because she continued to live there.

If property or money is given away, for example to children, this could be judged as something called ‘deprivation of assets’. This is where people deliberately reduce their assets to try to avoid paying for care. Some people believe there is a seven year time limit so that if assets are given away but care is not needed for at least seven years, that’s okay. But this is incorrect. There is no set time limit and everybody’s circumstances are different. Gifting money or property can also be subject to taxation.

Sometimes other family members who are not a spouse or partner carry on living in the home. This becomes quite complicated. Anyone in this situation would need to get information from the local council about their individual circumstances. Frances found herself in this situation. Her dad lived with her and her family when he first needed care. Later, when he moved into a care home he had a financial assessment. Because her dad part-owned the house this was counted as capital.

As an adult, Barbara thinks that each time she chooses to return a questionnaire or arrange a visit is a kind of re-consenting’ to the research.

Age at interview 73

Gender Female

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But there was a point in my life for all the participants where, you know, when you became your own person, no longer a child you did have the option of saying no I’m not interested I mean, I think that’s, I think, you know, that’s the point where you, I suppose quite a lot of people may have dropped out because they said, I don’t want to do this anymore, why am I doing this So I suppose effectively after the age of 18 was when I sort of started to participate in my own right.

And what do you remember about that? Was it a particular form that came where you were asked to re-consent or?

No I think, I suspect that there’s probably at every stage they probably have a bit of a drop out. Obviously the number of participants isn’t going to increase but people I suspect do drop out because they move, you know, if you move to Australia it’s a bit more difficult to sort of, you know, to participate, or of course some people die. I mean it’s as simple as that. So I think, you know, it’s a conscious effort, effort’s the wrong word, it’s a conscious decision to continue.

Each time?

Each time, yes.

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A financial assessment will consider dependents such as a wife or husband. Margaret found out through a financial assessment that she could have some money from her husband’s pension towards her household expenses.