How to Ensure Your Loved Ones are Taken Care of After Your Death with Wills and Trusts

When creating a Will or Trust, it’s important to consider how your assets will be distributed after your death. However, if you have a beneficiary who is underage, has special needs, or is otherwise vulnerable, it’s even more critical to ensure that they are protected and taken care of.

Here are some tips on how to protect your vulnerable beneficiaries with Wills and Trusts:

Set up a Trust: A Trust is a legal arrangement where a trustee holds and manages assets on behalf of a beneficiary. This can be an effective way to ensure that your vulnerable beneficiary’s needs are met, even if you’re no longer around to provide for them. A Trust can be tailored to the specific needs of your beneficiary, such as providing for their healthcare, education, or living expenses.

Name a Guardian: If you have a minor child, it’s important to name a Guardian in your Will. This person will be responsible for taking care of your child if you’re no longer around to do so. It’s essential to choose someone you trust and who is capable of providing for your child’s physical, emotional, and financial needs.

Consider a Disabled Trust : If your beneficiary has a disability or special needs, a Disabled Trust can be established to ensure that they are provided for without jeopardising their eligibility for government benefits. This type of Trust can be designed to provide for the beneficiary’s needs while still allowing them to receive government assistance.

Provide for a Trusted Caretaker: If your vulnerable beneficiary is an adult with special needs, it’s essential to ensure that they have a trusted caretaker who can provide for their needs. This could be a family member or a professional caregiver, depending on the circumstances. By providing for a trusted caretaker, you can ensure that your beneficiary’s needs are met even if you’re no longer around to do so.

Work with an Experienced Solicitor: Creating a Will or Trust can be complex, especially when dealing with vulnerable beneficiaries. It’s essential to work with an experienced solicitor who can guide you through the process and ensure that your wishes are carried out correctly.

Protecting vulnerable beneficiaries is crucial when creating a Will or Trust. By taking the time to consider their needs and providing for them in your estate plan, you can ensure that they are taken care of and have a bright future ahead of them.

The starting point is to ensure you have asked all friends and beneficiaries who may have a connection to the missing beneficiary.

If that method has been exhausted, it is recommended to place a statutory advertisement in the law gazette and local paper to where the deceased lived. It gives a beneficiary 2 months to come forward and make a claim on the estate. It could encourage a beneficiary to come forward.

The other common method to trace missing beneficiaries is through engaging a genealogist who will make detailed enquiries such as looking at family trees and historical records. Often such firms work on a fixed fee or contingency basis.

If a beneficiary cannot be found, then personal representatives should do one of the following:

1. Take out missing beneficiary insurance
2. Obtain indemnities from the known beneficiaries – this is an agreement between the personal representatives and known beneficiaries that they will reimburse the PRs if the missing beneficiary is later traced. It then allows the estate to be distributed.
3. The personal representatives could hold back the money that is due to the missing beneficiary in case they come forward in the next 12 months
4. Payment to court under section 63 Trustee Act 1925

Personal representatives can be held personally liable to beneficiaries if an estate is not distributed correctly so if there is a missing beneficiary it is advisable that personal representatives take legal advice to ensure they are taking the right steps.

Digital assets range from digital photos, social media accounts, graphics and artwork to cryptocurrencies and documents in an icloud account.

It is becoming more and more common for people to hold lots of their assets digitally and personal representatives need to have authority to deal with those assets when somebody dies.

Digital assets are intangible assets. This means that for these assets to pass in an estate to a beneficiary a specific gift is required in the Will.

It is also really important that your executors are given the power in your Will to deal with your digital assets too. This will allow them to access email accounts and delete emails or accounts.

For social media accounts, some will allow executors to close them down and others you must nominate someone to deal with them outside of the Will. This is always worth checking. For example, with your iPhone, it is essential that under your settings and passwords section that you nominate a ‘legacy contact’ so such person can access your photos and other information held on your phone. The same applies to Facebook – you can nominate a legacy person in the settings area.

With digital assets such as cryptocurrency, the executors will need to know the unique keys and log in details in order to access them and then arrange a transfer of the investments or encash them. If they have a monetary value, executors are required to inform HMRC for probate purposes.

It is recommended that an inventory of your digital assets and their passwords is provided and held with the Will to make it easier for executors to access them when you pass away. This along with the right clause in the Will for your executors to have the power to deal with them is very important.

Please give us a call to discuss further.

Do you have a beloved dog or cat and are wondering what will happen to them if you pass away?

You can include them in your Will so that somebody is nominated to look after them and this is often accompanied with a small gift of money to assist with the costs of their care. You can also express, if you have no such person, a charity you would like to help to rehome them.

If you do not want to put such a clause in your Will, you can instead express any wishes you have in a letter of wishes. A letter of wishes accompanies your Will but is not legally binding. It is there to guide your executors who should try to carry out those wishes.

If you wish to discuss this further, please give Welland Valley Legal a call or complete our contact form.

It is often assumed that family members or perhaps godparents will automatically look after your children should both Mum and Dad pass away.

This is wrong. You must appoint legal guardians in your Will to give them the legal right to look after your children. Without this, the court will step in and decide.

If you have just started a family or have older children who are still under the age of 18 it is highly recommended that you make a Will and appoint guardians so that you can have peace of mind that your children will be with the people you want them to be cared by.

Around £3 billion a year is received by charities through people leaving legacies in Wills. Leaving monies to charities is a great way to give back and support many institutions doing extraordinary things for people, animals and worthy causes. If legacies were not left by generous people in their Wills, many charities simply could not function and provide the valuable services they do.

Notwithstanding this but there can be huge tax incentives to leave charities a legacy. If more than 10% of your estate is gifted to charity and your estate is subject to inheritance tax, then the tax rate applied is reduced from 40% to 36%.

Finally, it is worth noting that if you die without a Will and there are no relatives, your estate with pass to the Crown. It is therefore imperative to make a Will and if you do not know who to leave your estate to, then name a charity so that you have peace of mind your estate will be put to good causes.

Getting married is one of the most exciting times of your life.

But did you know marriage revokes a Will?

This means that any Will you may have made before marriage becomes no longer valid. In addition, once you are married and without a valid Will, should you die, your spouse will only receive the first £275,000 of your estate, personal chattels and half the remainder of the estate and then any children you may have inherit the other half remaining in your estate.

As a result, upon marriage, it is recommended that you and your new spouse make a Will. You will be able to pass your entire to estate to each other and gain tax advantages through the spousal exemption.

It is also worth noting that if you are engaged, special wording can be applied to a Will should you want to make a Will before marriage to ensure the Will is not revoked upon marriage. Please get in touch to discuss this further.

Going forward all trusts whether created by Will or in your lifetime have to be registered on the trust registration service.

Previously trusts were predominantly registered whereby there would be annual trust returns due to tax liabilities.

Notwithstanding this, it is backdated too. This means that if you created a trust before this year, they too need registering with the trust registration service.

The only exceptions are charitable trusts, child trust funds, bereaved minors trust and disabled persons trust where they are the sole beneficiary.

If you have created a trust or you have just lost someone and not sure if there Will has created a registrable trust, please get in touch.

In addition, if you need help with registering a trust, we are here to help guide you through that process.

Trusts must have three things:

1. Certainty of intention
2. Certainty of objects
3. Certainty of subject matter

But what does this mean?

This means that much like a triangle, there are three points to a trust. Firstly there must be an intention to have a trust.

Secondly, certainty on who is to benefit.

Thirdly, certainty of what assets are going into the trust.

Trustees are appointed to be the legal persons in charge of the trust. They will administer the income and capital and take legal ownership of all trust assets.

Trustees in a discretionary trust, will have discretion on which beneficiaries you have named in the trust will benefit from income and capital of trust assets.

Trusts are used to reduce tax liabilities, protect vulnerable beneficiaries, reduce how much you have to pay for care home fees and protect business assets.

This question is often the first that will cross any executor’s mind. The answer is that it depends on the assets in the estate.

The following are circumstances where probate is unlikely to be required.

Firstly, joint assets. Where assets are held jointly such as a joint bank account, they automatically transfer to the fellow joint owner (called survivorship) negating the need for a Grant. There are exceptions to this for example in small cases where the property is held as ‘tenants in common’.

Secondly, assets held in trust. Where a Deceased benefitted from assets held in trust during their lifetime and they did not have any legal ownership to those assets then a Grant is unlikely to be required.

Thirdly, assets of low value. Banks will always release cash in bank accounts if the value is below £5,000. However, more and more common is that banks will also close accounts where less than £25,000 is held. Each bank has its own rules for this, so it is case dependant. 

Fourthly, personal chattels. You do not need a Grant to distribute a Deceased’s personal items such as sentimental jewellery if they held a Will. This is because an executor’s authority to deal with those assets derives from the Will. A Grant for this would be required however if they died intestate i.e. with no Will.

Finally, pensions and life policies written into trust. These assets do not form part of the Deceased’s estate for inheritance tax purposes and payment of them is at the discretion of the trustees. A grant is therefore not required provided that the Deceased has nominated beneficiaries for them in their lifetime. 

In summary, there are lots of situations where a Grant may not be required. If you are an executor or administrator of an estate and are unsure, please do make contact so we can advise you accordingly.