The short answer
You can answer this properly, and the method is a comparison rather than a calculation. On one side, what lifetime care is likely to cost, built from your own recurring expenses and projected across the years care will be needed. On the other, everything genuinely available to meet it: savings and investments earmarked for your child, property intended for their benefit, life cover that would actually pay out, and any income they receive in their own right.
Two disciplines make the comparison honest. Only count what is genuinely committed — a house you also intend to live in, or a policy whose premiums may lapse, is not a reliable asset for this purpose. And compare like with like, in real terms, so that a corpus earning a nominal return is not silently credited with growth that inflation takes back.
Then test it. The central case is the least informative version of the answer. What matters is whether the plan survives the plausible bad versions: care needed for longer than expected, paid support required sooner, a poor first decade of returns, or an unexpected housing cost. A plan that only works in the good case is a plan that has not yet been checked.
For most families the honest first answer is no, or not yet. That is a finding, not a verdict — and it arrives with a size, which is what makes it actionable.
What changes the answer
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What is genuinely earmarked, not just owned
Assets doing two jobs — funding your retirement and your child's care — should not be counted twice, though they very often are.
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Whether life cover is current and adequate
Cover bought years ago against a smaller assumption is the single most commonly out-of-date component in these plans.
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Your own retirement needs
Your income has to last too. A plan that funds your child by quietly assuming you will not need money is not a plan.
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How liquid the provision is
Property may be the largest asset and the slowest to convert, at exactly the moment care costs will not wait.
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Whether anything is legally structured
Funds that reach a person who cannot manage them, without a structure or a manager, may not be usable for their benefit at all.
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The stress case, not just the central case
Longer duration, earlier paid support, worse early returns. Whether the plan survives these is the real test.
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How often it has been reviewed
Costs, cover and needs all drift. An unreviewed answer decays quietly over years.
What parents often miss
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Double-counting the family home
The home frequently appears as both the retirement plan and the care fund. It can usually only be one.
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Assuming a sibling will make up the difference
Unless it has been discussed and agreed explicitly, this is a hope, and it should not be sitting inside the numbers as though it were an asset.
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Stopping at the total and never testing it
A plan that balances on central assumptions and fails on realistic ones has not really been answered yet.
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Treating "no" as failure
A quantified shortfall is the most useful output this exercise produces. It can be closed with time, cover, structure or a changed care assumption — none of which is available while the number is unknown.
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Solving funding without solving authority
Money and legal standing have to arrive together. Either alone can fail completely.
What a shortfall actually tells you
A couple believe they are in reasonable shape: a paid-off flat, steady investments and a life policy taken out years ago.
Compared properly against their son's projected lifetime care, there is a real gap. Two things caused most of it. The flat was counted twice — as their retirement security and as his care fund. And the life cover was sized against a much smaller and much shorter assumption than the projection they had just built.
Neither problem needed a new investment strategy. One needed an honest decision about which job the flat is actually doing, and the other needed a cover review. The gap did not disappear, but it stopped being mysterious, and two of the levers turned out to be within reach this year.
What to do next
Care Cost Planning puts the projected need and the existing provision side by side and shows the gap between them. Change the assumptions that worry you most — duration, care inflation, when paid support begins — and watch whether the plan holds.
Free, no sign-in, nothing saved. Download the report to take to an adviser.
Related planning areas
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How much will my child need after I am gone?
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How much corpus do I need?
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Financial Planning
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Readiness Check
Important
This page explains how families think about the arithmetic of lifetime care. It is not financial, investment, insurance or tax advice, and LegacyNest does not recommend products, schemes, allocations or providers. A projection is a consequence of the assumptions you give it, not a forecast of what will happen. Talk to a qualified financial adviser before acting on any figure you produce here.