Here’s an 8 minute video that will take you through how the care system works and the funding options that we look at for clients:

In simplistic terms, the type of client that best fits our service is someone paying their own care costs (in a care home or to a care agency providing care in their own home) and who has enough capital to meet their shortfall i.e. the gap between the care costs and their existing, guaranteed income, for upwards of three years.  Anyone who is likely to run out of money in less than three years is unlikely to be able to afford a care fees annuity.

We would usually expect to be dealing with an Attorney or Court Appointed Deputy rather than the person needing care themselves.

For anyone wanting generic advice, our website www.eldercaregroup.co.uk should give them plenty of useful information including our ‘Paying for Care Guide’ which can be downloaded from the bottom of the home page.  If they are looking to plan ahead, however, there are no longer any pre-funded long-term care insurance products on the market.

A simple email to [email protected] with ‘Paradigm Member LTC referral’ in the subject line is the best way to get in touch.  We will work with as much or as little information as you have available about the client situation.  If you want to outline the scenario to us first, to see if we can help, please do.  Otherwise, when you are ready to refer the client to us, as a bare minimum, we need a name and telephone number or email address of the person with the legal authority to speak to us and what their relationship is with the person in care.

We will attempt to make contact with the client within 24 hours of your instruction and we will report back to you the next steps.  If the client wants us to obtain underwritten care annuity quotes for them, the process can take 4 – 6 weeks as an average, due to the requirement for a GP report to be requested and completed.

A decision to buy an care annuity, once the quotes are received and our report is issued to the client, can be fast or slow depending on family dynamic and availability of capital (i.e. house sale or not).

We guarantee not to talk about investments other than very generically and this will be referred back to you either to advise on what to do with the residual capital after a care annuity is purchased or, if the annuity is declined, how to fund care fees from capital, in the knowledge that we have covered off the ‘CF8’ elements of the advice process.

We will only send you copies of our report if we have written permission from your client to do so.  We are not offering a para-planning service; all advice has to be given directly by us to the client via a clear ‘handover’ and we would respectfully ask that you do allow us to do our job in the knowledge that we will a) do it well and b) will not do anything other than advise on and potentially implement a care fees annuity as a funding solution.

We will pay you 20% of any arrangement fee that we charge the client.  Payment is made once the 30 day cooling off period has elapsed.

We can provide the wording for a client newsletter, about care fees funding, allowing you to promote the fact that you can now offer this advice by referral to, and by working in conjunction with, ourselves. Even if your clients don’t have care needs themselves (yet!) they will probably know someone who does. Many of your professional connections will also have clients that could benefit from our advice and we can discuss ways to help you promote this with them.