My bruvs FiL died recently. Everything left to his spouse.
A few minor things to sort…shares, PBonds etc in his name, but bruv been in touch to say solicitor wants £220 + vat per hour to sort.
Just wants my advice as to whether to engage said solicitor…surely this can be done by contacting the various institutions involved and supplying death certificate, especially if P of A already in place.
Anyone any experience of such please ?
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Sorted my mums estate out myself, inc probate.
Its simply a matter of death certificates, letters and phone calls. The probate form is pretty straightforward with good explanatory notes available.
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I did my late Aunts, with minimum input from a solicitor. I’d have thought with a surviving spouse, it would be straightforward. Especially as offspring have P of A.
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>> My bruvs FiL died recently. Everything left to his spouse.
>> A few minor things to sort…shares, PBonds etc in his name, but bruv been in
>> touch to say solicitor wants £220 + vat per hour to sort.
Why is he getting involved?
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When my aunt died 5 years ago my dad did all of this stuff.
It's not being ungenerous to say if he could do it, anyone can do it.
(Aunt was a warn and thoroughly eccentric woman and so easy to lead up the garden path. Someone of a different era entirely - would have happily existed in the 1920s / 30s for all of her life.)
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Did the estate for my mum. Her solicitor wanted a cut of the estate coming to thousands to do it, so I thought I’d give it a go.
All worked out ok, even with some tax complexities.
The biggest pain was the useless share companies, and there seemed to be lots of calls from me where they said one thing but meant another, or hadn’t done what they said they would, or had lost the documents, or paid the wrong amount, etc. but we got there in the end.
Took from January when she died to November to finally pay everyone out.
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No need to pay £k for a solicitor, and his secretary would be doing all the work anyway.
I've done it five times now. It can be repetitive, tedious, frustrating and tiresome but it's not difficult. The only problems I've had was delay after delay from a claims dept at a certain Life in Sunny Canada company who needed a prod from the Financial Ombudsman to resolve and another occasion where a co-executor in the Will had moved overseas and a company couldn't decide what proof of ID was acceptable.
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Simple process where everything goes to the spouse - no inheritance tax so probate should be easy The problem can be obstinate 3rd parties - insurance companies, transfer shares etc etc.
Gather all the asset information & any liabilities.
Any joint bank accounts go to the surviving name on the account.
If they own the house you will can do it yourself, via forms you can download. However I believe you will need a solicitor to " notarize the change" i.e. verify all is legit.
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The only caveat I can add, and only useful pre death, is that many companies wont accept copies of death certificates, and you often wait ages for the return of such when sent to interested parties.
So get more copies of death certificate than you think you need when registering death. I had been pre warned, so i did, and I was able to make representations in a parallel fashion, not serially. That way I managed death to probate in 3/4 months.
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Not that we'll care by then, but in preparation for our meeting with the great redeemer I've nearly completed an assets spreadsheet, listing all the different pensions, savings pots, ISAs, premium bond holder numbers etc etc and bank accounts we have. Also added website names and contact details. The kids are our executors and it might help them get started.
(I'm also working on an "if I croak" one which describes the home automation systems and how to operate or reverse them but that's another story!!).
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I assume the solicitor is not appointed as an executor by the will but rather your bro has sought advice.
A simple estate where all goes to the surviving spouse shouldn't need professional help. I did one myself years ago re an aged Aunt where both appointed executors pre-deceased her. Technically that required Letters of Administration with Will Attached but the only complexity was ticking boxes and providing evidence of the death of my Father and a Welsh Solicitor.
Ambled over to the family court for an appointment I'd made in my lunch break to swear the affidavit. Nothing else was difficult. As Zero says having plenty of copies of the grant helps. Insurance companies were a bit pernickety about stuff and she had shares in a private company that had to be divided up. That was as difficult as it got.
Similar with my Mother out Law where my partner was the executor but I did the legwork.
My own Mother on the other hand would have been beyond my level of confidence. Over the IHT limit until excess allowance from my Father and the exemption for residential property was in play. And Mum was hopeless at keeping records so various payments she'd made to my self and my sis, some gifts, some reimbursement for stuff that had been done for her had to be untangled.
I think the solicitor, who offered to do it for a fixed fee of several thousand, had her fingers burned as the billed time was about 3x what she'd committed to.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Fri 12 Jan 24 at 10:03
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Got involved with helping SWMBO and her sisters for my late MIL. The only snag was a certain bank, which insisted on sending everything to 'the late', had several death certificates and only woke up when we threatened to go through the banking ombudsman.
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DIY isn't particularly difficult. It will be time-consuming. The various banks etc. will behave as though none of their clients has *ever* died before.
Even the various reliefs to which Brompton refers aren't hard work (and they won't be relevant in this case). You need an extra form for each one, but mostly you're just copying the name and reference number across.
What it does give him a chance to sort out is getting everything ready for the next death.
Reduce the number of ISAs to one - put them all into somebody like Hargreaves Lansdown (there are cheaper providers); do likewise with the shares.
Get all dividends paid into a single bank account, not by cheque. And then get Brother on as a joint account holder with MIL. That way, when MIL dies, your brother won't be faced with the bank account being closed and loads of cheques being sent instead. If MIL doesn't like the idea of a joint account, then when she dies just don't tell the bank and they will blissfully keep the account open for years.
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>> Reduce the number of ISAs to one - put them all into somebody like Hargreaves
>> Lansdown (there are cheaper providers); do likewise with the shares.
AJ Bell and Vanguard are Which? recommended. HG is not.
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I has the game where a couple of share companies insisted they sent cheques made out to “the executors of”, and the banks would only accept such cheques into an account with that name, of course.
NatWest, her bank, wouldn’t let me use her old account for these cheques, nor would they entertain opening an executors account.
I bank with Santander and Lloyds. Santander told me, like the NatWest, they don’t offer executor accounts.
Luckily Lloyds did let me make a new executor account, pay in the cheques, withdraw them three days later, close the account. They were very nice about it too, very efficient, and I had a named contact and actual phone number for someone in my local branch as well.
But my co executor had to be with me at the opening of it physically, so had to make a trip down from Scotland. Thank goodness she doesn’t live in Australia.
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Legal fees apres la mort - Zero
