Private client partner Kieran Bowe joins fellow guests Kari Mellon, founder and owner of Opes Tax, and Rebecca Benneyworth, a chartered accountant at Rebecca Benneyworth & Co, as specialists on Not the Martin Lewis Podcast. In this offshoot of the usual Martin Lewis Podcast, specialists answer listeners' questions that fall beyond the realm of Martin Lewis's expertise or those he cannot address due to regulations.
Kieran delves into various topics, including Inheritance Tax (IHT) and property assets, lifetime giving and IHT, navigating probate delays, unlocking an estate by paying IHT before a grant of probate is issued, and how trusts may work for your loved ones.
I have a huge amount of sympathy for people trying to file for probate at the moment. There are certain circumstances where you can get a grant on a very fast basis but that is, for example, where a property has come under-offer prior to date of death or in cases of extreme financial hardship. Other than that, I’m afraid you are left to the standard process: grants being issued in a region of about 12-16 weeks — 25 weeks or more for complex paper applications. The key thing is getting your application into the court as swiftly as possible, managing expectations within the estate, significantly if there is a property to be sold, and taking steps, if there is any inheritance tax to pay, to pay as much as you can from liquid assets in the estate prior to date of grant.
Passing your property into trust or passing it even to other individuals deliberately to reduce the value of your estate for purposes of shielding it from care fees will not work. The local authority is alive to those issues and will seek to recover the value of your estate for purposes of paying care fees.
The full conversation is available on BBC Sounds (content available until 17 June 2025.)
Kieran Bowe is a partner in the private client team advising on tax, estate and succession planning.
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