InHouse Wills & Probate
Will Trusts
Do the best for your family:
don’t leave your children a penny,
but protect the family inheritance for your children and generations to come by leaving it to a Family Trust.
Will Trusts
For many people just the idea of a ‘trust’ sounds far too complicated - but actually it need not be.
Leaving something ‘in trust’ just means leaving it with conditions, giving you some control over what happens when you have passed away. The condition could be as simple as ‘...for such of my children as attain 25...’ Many simple Wills include wording like that, to protect youngsters from coming into a lot of money before they are mature enough to handle it properly.
Another relatively common type of trust is a Property Trust. Typically this gives a surviving spouse the right to live in the house, whilst ensuring that eventually it will be passed to the family. Thus, if the spouse re-marries the house cannot be given away to the new step family and it also prevents it being swallowed up by the likes of Long Term Care fees.
In other cases a trust might be to look after the inheritance for a Disabled Beneficiary, or for a family member who would be likely to be unable to handle finances sensibly.
Trusts can also help to protect family inheritance against debt, divorce, undue influence and much, much more. Those with a family business can also benefit from a trust, with the potential to minimise inheritance tax.
The trust is managed by trustees - normally the executors that you have appointed in the Will. They are under various legal obligations to behave responsibly and can only work within the conditions that you put in the Will. Nevertheless, you should always choose only people on whom you can rely.
Although most trust broadly fall into either Discretionary Trusts or Life Interest Trusts, there are so many possibilities with the details that it is no wonder that people are worried about them. That is why clients need a personal appointment with an experienced Will writing consultant - the client can focus on the family issues that need to be addressed, whilst the consultant can suggest the most appropriate trust to handle it.