Was your will made before 2009?

If your will was made in 2008 or before, you could be costing your children thousands of pounds from their inheritance! Often my first contact with a new client is when I'm asked to review their old wills. The natural assumption being it is fine, but because it hasn't been looked at for a while, there might be a few tweaks necessary. If the will was made before 2009 however, they nearly always get a bit of a surprise....

You see, Gordon Brown made big changes to Inheritance Tax in 2008. These were warmly welcomed in general because it effectively doubled how much we could leave to our kids before paying any inheritance tax. Prior to this the only way to replicate this tax relief was to use a special trust in our will and most made before 2008 still contain it.

As a result of these tax changes, the trust no longer offered any benefit and now created some administrative problems when doing probate. These days the big problem is that the trust prevents the use of additional inheritance tax allowances that came into force over the past few years. Thousands of pounds could be lost in Inheritance Tax which otherwise would have gone to your children and can be easily avoided with some simple changes.

So... dig out your Will and check when it was made!