Services - tax efficient Legal Plans (Last Will, EPA, AMD)

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Keeping it up to date

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Family Services

Wills

One of the problems with Wills is that people tend to be rather reluctant to make them, and this reluctance tends to include not revising the Will once it has been made. Typically, people die many years after making a Will, and the Will is no longer as relevant to their needs as it was. People have died, gone bankrupt, married, divorced, had children, left the country. Guardians who may no longer be appropriate, your legacies may have been left to people who have no need of the money (or worse where it will just go in tax).

Tax rules change, peoples needs change. You owe it to those you love to make your Will (and other planning) both up to date and relevant. 

To arrange or revise a Will, click here

What is a Will?

A Will is a legal document which indicates what you want to happen to your Estate when you die. Home made Wills may be perfectly valid, but one of our professional Consultants will cover many areas which most people will never even consider, and could save your family an enormous amount of money. 

The consultation may also provide much better security for both you and your family. 

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Executor Services

SAVE MONEY WITH SWW Trust Corporation EXECUTORSHIP SERVICES

Many people say that banks and solicitors only write Wills so they can get the valuable Probate work It is understandable that friends and relatives may be reluctant to act as basic errors can make them personally liable for substantial damages. However, on a simple £100,000 estate, Banks & Solicitors charges could range from £3,000 to £5,00 +. We can save you money is several ways:

1) Sole Executorship - we do not recommend ourselves as sole Executors: this is always the most expensive option and is not often appropriate. 

2) Reserve & Advisory Executorship - SWW Trust Corporations Unique & economical option - with this service, our service is available to assist and advise your Executors - when and if they wish. Should your Executors die or be unable or unwilling to act, we will then step in as emergency Reserve Executors.

3) Low fees - our specialist service charges only for the level of expertise required by the task - why pay £180 an hour (or more) for relatively straightforward work? Generally speaking, we would expect to save you (or your heirs) at least 25% over traditional methods, and often much more.  Call them on 01522 687 888 Option 2 for find out.
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WHAT DOES AN EXECUTOR DO?

When you write a Will, you must appoint an Executor and Trustee to handle your affairs when you die. Most people think that this is an easy task but it can end up extremely complex and, of course, it all happens at the time of greatest grief.

We know only too well the problems that can arise and that is why, by appointing our service as Reserve Executor and Trustee, you can have peace of mind knowing that your estate will be dealt with by experts in a professional, efficient and caring manner if your first choice is unable to cope. We will also be on hand to advise if needed.

The Trustee & Executor is an independent company, who will offer impartial professional help, as needed.

However, our service does differ in the rates that they charge - they are lower than both solicitors and banks - and they are significantly lower.

An Executor or Trustee, whether a lay-person or a professional is legally responsible in law for:

Our service can remove all these problems and handle the administration of your estate extremely quickly for you. They can ensure that, in the event of any delay, families are cared for financially. If you have already written a Will but decide to appoint us as Executors, please contact us for further information and we can add the necessary clauses to your Will for you. If you find yourself in a position either where someone has appointed you to be their Executor, left a Will where there is no Executor to act or if you have lost a loved one who has not left a Will, we can take the worry and burden from your shoulders and deal with the estate on your behalf.

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Pre-Paid Funeral Plans

Why pre-pay for Funerals?

Research
We have researched the market (and continue to keep it under review), so we are able to recommend the most appropriate plan.

Payment
You can pay in a single sum if you are able, alternative interest free over 12 months, or over up to 5 years with a modest charge for interest. For info

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Lasting Powers of Attorney

People tend to think that someone else will look after their financial and other matters if they become unable to manage through accident or illness. In point of fact, even a spouse cannot sort out everything, and it may become necessary to ask the Public Trustee to be appointed by the Court to manage matters, for which they will charge. The same applies to most businesses.

Clearly it is much better (and cheaper!) to appoint your partner, parents, spouse, co-director, children or a friend as Attorney just in case. Perhaps 1 in 5 will need an LPA before retirement, and after retirement over half the population are likely to need one at some stage, whether through complete incapacity, or just because (whilst perfectly mentally capable) they just do not wish to cope with the stress of managing their affairs any longer.

LPAs come in two types 

- Property and Affairs deals with Finance

- Welfare looks after care and accommodation issues as well as medical ones, but it cannot be used unless the donor has lost mental competence, so we advise a Medical Directive too.

RECOMMENDATION: everyone over 18 should have an LPA (lasting power of attorney) to ACT click here

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Advance Medical Directives / Living Wills

The point which most miss is that a Living Will can appoint a medical proxy, who is specifically authorised by you to deal with medical decisions if you are unable to.  A legally married partner will normally be consulted, but the have NO authority unless they have been appointed as your medical proxy.

Many people appreciate that neither they nor their family will have any real influence over their medical treatment in the event you are not sufficiently alert to make decisions themselves.

The British Medical Association is keen to support the use of Advance Directives, which is the only way to ensure your wishes are followed.

What an Advance Medical Directive cannot do is authorise euthanasia. Most people authorise doctors to maintain pain control, not to preserve your life artificially if there is no prospect of your recovering in any meaningful sense of the word. 

To ACT, click here

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Inheritance Tax Savings

WHAT IS YOUR ESTATE?
Sounds like a simple question?

Sorry - it is not. 

We can discuss this with you, but the following (amongst others) should be considered:

To Act, click here

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Community Care Fees Planning

Whilst Inheritance Tax ("IHT") may slow down the trickle of wealth "down the generations" by taxing it at a "modest" 40%, but Community Care Tax can come close to being a 100% tax on your wealth.

Most of this drain is AVOIDABLE!

If your assets exceed £20,500 and you need residential nursing care, the Government will contribute between nothing and a maximum of £139 p.w. to the costs you incur. These will typically be at least £500 a week.

YOU must find the rest. Once your assets drop below £20,500 you will receive a slightly higher contribution, until below £11,500 the whole cost (up to a maximum set by your local Council) will be met by the Council. However, they are under a legal duty to recover as much as possible of the costs from your estate, and may well pursue people you have given significant gifts to and they will also sell your home (if you own it) unless it is still occupied by an acceptable dependent. 

To ACT, click here

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Charity
Many Charities raise an enormous amount of money through Legacies.
We can help your charity in several ways:

Contact us

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Business

Business Protection & Succession & Tax Planning for companies, sole proprietors and partnerships.
What happens if you or key people are taken out of the picture?

Are you paying to much tax? We understand that Wills and LPAs written to assist the survival of a business on death or incapacity can be business expenses.

Staff Benefits - add our economical services to your Staff Benefit Schemes to the enormous benefit of your staff and their families. 

Business Staff Benefit scheme enquiry click here

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Professional Maintenance Service       (Click here for details of PMS)

A true story from a colleague - make sure nothing similar happens to your family..

We had a client – who had us draw up a Will for him. He was a complex character with a number of issues in his life, the principal one being that he was estranged from his direct family and had been so for many years. He was middle aged, rich and single. His long term partner had just died and this was what had prompted him to make a Will as the rules of intestacy when she died gave the home he was living in to his partner’s estranged husband.

Fortunately, he had five other homes – two flats and a house in London, a house in Bath and a flat in Edinburgh, where he liked to go each year while the Festival was on, plus a thriving business, and a collection of books valued in the hundreds of thousands.  Losing his partner’s home was bearable, sadly the grief was not.

When I met with him to draft his Will there was one overriding sentiment - that what was his wealth should go to those who were important to him. So we drafted the document.  Each of his five homes was gifted to an individual, one to his late partner’s daughter, one to his son, one each to the executors of his Will as they were his most trusted friends and the last to his godson. The business was shared equally between his partner’s daughter and the two executors. A number of specific family items were passed back to his family, but it was his clear intent that they were not to benefit from the bulk of his wealth.

It was a good Will, it achieved everything that he wanted, and sorted his affairs to his satisfaction, we executed the document and offered our normal storage facilities. He did not take our storage option as ‘he had a safe place for his important documents’.

On the first anniversary of his partner’s death, four months after making the Will, the grief became too much and he took a bottle of tablets and a bottle of whisky.

His friends found him, and being friends they called his parents to advise them that he had died, they came over straight away – they hadn’t seen him for ten years..

His friends knew that they were executors, they even had an unsigned copy of the Will, and details of our address so they called us for the original. We let them know that he had chosen to keep the document himself and that it would be amongst his possessions – it wasn’t, they found everything but the Will.

The parents knew about the Will and they also knew it could not be found.

The options now were:

·          find the Will and distribute the estate according to his wishes or

·          declare that he died intestate and the parents copped the lot.

Six months passed and the Will was ruled to be presumed revoked by destruction, the parents got their letters of administration and their million pound property portfolio and the people Fred wanted to benefit got nothing.

We don’t know who destroyed the Will or how it was lost, we don’t know if he intended to revoke his Will, the only thing we do know is that if we had held the Will in storage there would have been some certainty in his estate.

Over 2 million homes are in danger of flooding, there are over 1 million burglaries each year, countless fires, and worst of all there are rather a large number of people who would be happy to burn a small document like a Will, given the chance, if it meant they were to inherit an extra few thousand pounds, never mind a few hundred thousand pounds.

PMS:

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