Knowing where you stand
The starting point is an honest picture of the estate: what it is worth, who would receive what, when they would receive it, and what the tax would be today. From there the options — and their deadlines — become concrete.
Who we serve
Built over a lifetime. Passed on with care.
You want what you have built to reach the people you choose. A will is the start of that, not the whole of it — it also means knowing what the estate is worth and what the tax on it would be, using the allowances the rules provide, and making sure pensions, policies and trusts all point where you intend. Most of this is best done with years in hand.
How we help
Time is the main allowance.
Using the time you have
The rules leave real room for giving — annual allowances, gifts from surplus income, and larger gifts that fall out of the estate over time. We help you decide what you can afford to give away, and when, without putting your own retirement at risk.
Getting the structure right
Pensions, life policies and trusts each pass on under their own rules, and they need to agree with your will rather than work against it. We advise on how yours are arranged and written, alongside your solicitor where the drafting is theirs to do.
The hard part
“How much can I afford to give away?”
This is the question that actually holds people up, and it is not really a tax question. The risk that keeps people awake is not paying more tax than necessary — it is giving away money they turn out to need, at an age when earning it again is not an option.
So we answer it in that order. First we work out what your own future costs, including a pessimistic version of it — a long life, a period of care, an unhelpful decade in markets. What is genuinely surplus to that is what can be given away, and it is usually more than people fear and less than the tax arithmetic alone would suggest.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that a gift is not a loan. Money given away is gone, and arrangements that try to have it both ways — giving an asset away while continuing to enjoy it — are exactly the ones the rules are written to catch. We would rather help you give a smaller amount properly than a larger amount in a way that unravels later.
Trusts
Where a trust earns its place.
Trusts tend to be sold rather harder than they are needed. They are neither a loophole nor a relic — they are a way of separating who controls money from who benefits from it, and that is worth paying for when control or timing genuinely matters.
The circumstances that call for one are usually recognisable. A beneficiary too young to handle a lump sum, or one who would lose means-tested support by receiving it. A second marriage, where you want to provide for a spouse and still be certain the capital reaches your own children. A family business that should pass intact rather than in slices. In each of those the trust is doing something a will cannot.
Where none of that applies, a trust adds cost, tax reporting and administration in return for very little, and we will say so. Where one is warranted, we advise on how it fits the rest of the plan and work alongside the solicitor who draws it up.
A trust's own tax treatment depends on the circumstances in which it is set up, and may change in future.
What your family will face
The first problem is rarely the tax.
When someone dies, the family's immediate difficulty is usually information rather than inheritance tax. Which pensions existed, which policies were in force, who the adviser was, where the will is kept, whether anyone has the passwords — the tax bill arrives well after those questions have been answered the hard way.
Several things pass outside the will altogether, and those are the ones most often left stale. A pension usually follows the nomination you last completed, not the will, and how a pension passes on is an area the rules have changed more than once — worth revisiting rather than assuming. Life policies written in trust pay out to the trustees. Jointly held assets go where the ownership says they go. We check that each of these points where you actually intend, because a contradiction here quietly overrides the document everybody was relying on.
Passing wealth on is also a conversation about people, not only tax: who is ready to receive what, and when. We are happy to have that conversation with the next generation present, where you would like them to understand the plan rather than discover it.
Planning within the rules
Careful planning, nothing clever.
Inheritance tax planning has a deserved reputation for schemes that promise much and end badly. We do not use unregulated schemes or aggressive arrangements — the plans we build rely on the allowances and structures the rules put there to be used.
To be fair, we expect every good adviser to take the same line, and the ones worth dealing with do. What we would add is that the plainest version of this planning is usually also the most durable: it survives a change in the rules, it can be explained to your children, and it does not depend on a reading that only holds while nobody looks at it closely.
Tax treatment depends on your individual circumstances and may change in future. The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate taxation and trust advice, or the drafting of wills.