ARE YOU PLUGGED INTO MUCH FAIRER DEALS YET?
QI’m thinking of applying for the Fair Deal scheme for nursing home care for myself. I know the house is sold after I die to help pay the bill for my care. But my daughter, her husband and children still live in the house. Will they have to leave? Should I sign the house over to them now?
AAs the RTÉ recent documentary on Fair Deal highlighted, the scheme is pretty complicated. However, to put it in a nutshell, the value of all your assets are totted up, including part of the value of your home, and you’re given a loan based on these assets to cover the cost of your care.
Naturally, the more you have, the bigger the loan, and the more you have to repay.
However, there are safeguards built in to ensure that repaying the loan won’t gobble up more then 22.5% of the value of the family home, even if it is included.
The loan covers the cost of your care and doesn’t have to be repaid until you die, or move out, or in certain cases, when your carer dies or moves out.
This is the nub of the first part of your question: does your daughter and her family qualify as your carer? Hopefully, she will – I don’t see why not.
However, these things are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
When I asked the HSE, a spokeswoman said: ‘The best thing (to find out whether your daughter qualifies) is to contact your local Nursing Home Support Office.’ Contact details can be found on the HSE website www.hse.ie.
Your local Citizens Information office or the website www.citizensinformation.ie also have lots of clearly explained, useful information on the Fair Deal scheme.
Although the loan may not be called in for hopefully many years, in the meantime, you notionally pay 7.5% of the value every year, up to a maximum of 22.5% after three years.
After that, there is no more to pay and although a notional interest rate is applied, this is only at the same rate as inflation, which is barely above zero at present.
As for whether you should transfer your home to your daughter to avoid it being taken into consideration at all, I’m afraid that won’t work.
Assets that have been transferred less than five years before the application for the scheme are included in your financial assessment.
QYou wrote about electric cars last week. Which one is cheapest? My own car isn’t worth that much and is expensive to run with high road tax and maintenance. Could I trade it in with a scrappage deal and get a cheap electric vehicle?
AThe cheapest electric vehicle (EV) in Ireland is the Renault Twizzy, a tiny smart car that costs just €9,995. But it’s little bigger than a fourwheel quad-bike – and you have to pay extra to lease the batteries. (See renault.ie.)
Another cut-price option the not-quiteso-small Reva, a little-known vehicle that costs €11,000 – and runs up motor tax at just €31 per year.
The downside here is its range is just 80km and the top speed is 80kph.
There are no scrappage deals on those options.
If you want a medium-sized EV, the most popular option with around twice the speed and range of the Reva is the car I test-drove for last week’s article – the Nissan Leaf.
This is the cheapest family sized EV, costing from €21,490 – or €17,000 after scrappage.
As long as it has an NCT cert, you can trade in your car and get €4,000 scrappage from Nissan.
But as we warned last week, resale values can fall sharply with EVs because the market is so small and the technology changes so fast that the older ones may seem obsolete.
Current models offer much higher range than previously and may not suffer so much from that problem.
Several companies offer sportierlooking electric cars than the Leaf but they tend to be priced north of €30,000 – such as the nice-looking but pricey Hyundai Ioniq for €39,000.