Having worked hard all your life and put in place a Will to express your wishes, how would you feel if external factors prevented your estate from being administered in accordance with your wishes?
YOUR WILL IS WHAT YOU WANT TO HAPPEN, A FAMILY PROTECTION TRUST ENSURES THAT IT DOES.
If you’ve worked hard your whole life to leave a legacy for you loved ones, it would be a shame for the inheritance to be lost. There are six main problems that put your estate under threat.
Probate Costs and Administration
Probate is the legal process of administering the estate of someone who has passed away. It can be expensive and time-consuming, often taking 9-12 months to complete. Most people will use their bank or solicitor to help, who on average charge 3% of the value of the estate to carry out the work. For any assets you hold in in trust, there is NO probate. Priced at a fixed fee, a Family Protection Trust offers a significant financial saving, as well as saving your family the burden of the stress and administration of the probate process at what will already be a very difficult time for them. Assets held in trust are usually transferred to the beneficiaries within 28 days of the death.
Children inheriting at the wrong time
Surprisingly, it might not always be convenient for your loved ones to inherit at the time that they do. If, for example, they are in the process of a divorce, their inheritance could form part of the divorce settlement. If they are receiving benefits, the inheritance could cause their benefits to be lost or reduced.
Sideways Disinheritance
If you or your partner dies and the surviving partner remarries, the inheritance can pass to another family, leaving out your children. This is known as sideways disinheritance. Assets in a trust are protected from sideways disinheritance so you can have peace of mind that your assets will go to those you intend.
Claims on the estate
Families can be complicated and, on occasion, parents choose to leave a child out of their Will. By law, that child has a right to contest the Will and make a claim on the estate and are quite often successful. It is considerably more difficult to contest a Trust, making it unlikely for assets to pass to a family member that you did not intend.
Care
Currently, anyone with assets above £23,250 in England or £50,000 in Wales may not receive state help with Care Costs, meaning that many families would have to sell their home to fund Care.
Children’s Inheritance Tax (IHT)
Even though you might not have an IHT issue, without a Trust you can unwittingly create one for your children. Assets left to them in Trust will not form part of their estate so will not attract IHT.
To put it simply, a Family Protection Trust is like a safety deposit box, where you can put your house and other financial assets. This ring-fences those assets against risks that may arise in the future. You have complete control as trustee and beneficiary, You can still move, sell and invest just as you normally would. Your Will is what you want to happen, a Trust ensures that it does!
You are the trustees of your own Trust, giving you complete control. You can, however, appoint other trustees if you wish. One option is to appoint a professional trustee, which is a service we offer. This has a number of benefits:
It takes around 4-5 weeks to set up a trust and we hold your hand through the whole process. Nothing is binding until you have seen the trust documents and are happy with the content.
To support causes close to our hearts, 5 years ago we decided that we would no longer charge for writing Wills, instead asking clients to make a recommended donation of £40 to charity. We were so confident that people would be happy with our Will-Writing service that we believed they would come back in the future for other legal services, at which point we could charge our usual fees. This has proved true, and over 63% of clients do come back for further advice.
We are proud to have raised over £2,000.000 in upfront donations, supporting fantastic causes up and down the country.