We can help you to plan your estate and mitigate tax liabilities on your death.

Estate planning – or the mitigation of inheritance tax (IHT) – may involve creating trusts, lifetime trusts or giving away assets. We can advise you on the solutions available and put the necessary measures in place.

In our modern world, family scenarios are complex and can often involve multiple marriages and children. Wills reflect this so it’s vital to get the measures in place now, including appointing any guardians for children.

There are two different areas to consider.

Firstly, we can manage the estate planning for business owners or entrepreneurs who are still taking an income from their company and need to determine their exit strategy from their businesses.

We work with business owners and their advisers to protect their interests and put in place measures to mitigate their tax liability through careful estate planning which can often involve trust advice.

We recognise that many people are wanting to continue to work – long into retirement. We can manage planned gifts into trusts or to direct gifts to children.

We can advise on and draft the relevant type of trust and provide options for wider intergenerational estate planning.

For many of our clients, it can be a wider conversation about control of your estate and any concerns you have – namely, who receives what and when from your estate. We can discuss your concerns openly and empathetically with you to ensure your estate planning meets your needs.
We can bring in a family law specialist should the need arise to discuss pre-nuptial agreements or cohabitation agreements where appropriate.

The second area of estate planning is the retired pensioner or someone who has already sold their business. They have done the hard work, retired, and are now enjoying life. Their main concern is the IHT due on their death.

We work with financial advisers to work out how much capital you need for an income and whether it is appropriate to gift any of the estate to your family.

It could mean they gift commercial or residential property to their family. Each time, we devise a bespoke solution for our clients as we know that no single client issue is ever the same.

Clients often seek advice when they downsize, moving into a smaller property can be fraught with issues and we can deal with any IHT planning issues providing advice around using the residential nil rate band or addressing concerns regarding care home fee mitigation.