For the full article by Dura Society: Writing Your Will: What Women With Wealth Need to Know
The article has been reproduced below with kind permission.
The Basics: What a Will Does (and Doesn’t Do)
A will is the document through which you direct how your estate, your money, property, and possessions, are distributed when you die. It lets you appoint executors to manage your affairs, name guardians for any children under 18, and set out your wishes clearly. Without one, a set of rules called the intestacy rules step in to make those decisions for you.
One thing people frequently forget: jointly held assets don’t pass under the terms of your will at all, but to the surviving holder. For example, if you own a property with a spouse as joint tenants rather than tenants in common, that property will pass automatically to the surviving spouse regardless of what your will says. Knowing exactly how your assets are held matters before you can plan effectively for what happens to them.
Not making a decision is still a decision. The intestacy rules will make it for you.
The intestacy rules produce outcomes that often surprise people. If you die with a spouse and children, the spouse does not automatically receive everything. Under the current rules, they receive all personal chattels, a statutory legacy of the first £322,000, and half the remainder. The other half goes to the children at 18 on the ‘statutory trusts’, with no flexibility on timing. For anyone with young children, that outcome is unlikely to reflect what they would have chosen.
For those without a spouse or children, the rules pass assets to parents in equal shares if they survive, which, from a tax planning perspective, is usually the opposite of what most people would want.
When to Act
You can legally make a will from 18. In practice, most people only think seriously about it when they marry or have children, and that is better than nothing. There are, however, other moments that should prompt an immediate review.
Buying a home matters because it is likely the largest single asset in your estate, and you need to have thought about where it goes. Inheriting significant assets raises questions about expectations and family wishes. Starting to cohabit without marrying is a critical one: an unmarried partner has no automatic right to inherit and receives nothing under the intestacy rules. They will receive nothing unless your will explicitly provides for them.
Getting married in England automatically revokes any existing will, making it essential to put a new one in place promptly after marriage. It is possible, however, to put in place a will in contemplation of marriage. Divorce, on the other hand, will treat an ex-spouse as having died for the purposes of the will, but the rest of the document remains in force, which can create partial intestacy if there is no contingency beneficiary named. The important thing to note there is that divorce proceedings can take years, and waiting for the final decree before reviewing your will is inadvisable. You should review your will on separation from your partner and at the stage of the final divorce.
Starting a business is another trigger point that gets overlooked. What happens to your shares or partnership interest on your death? Should they be passed on or sold? Who would run the business if you wanted it to continue? These are questions that need to be built into the structure of your will, not left as assumptions.
Complexity Considerations
Professional advice is not only for the very wealthy, and the belief that it is causes real problems. Complexity can arise in other ways, not just through the total estate value. Owning interests in a family business, holding agricultural property, having children from more than one relationship, or being internationally mobile in terms of where you live or where your assets sit, are all examples of scenarios which would merit targeted planning and advice.
International assets deserve specific attention. Many countries have forced heirship provisions or matrimonial property regimes that could override the choices you have made in your English will. Taking advice from English solicitors is an excellent starting point, but it may need to be coordinated with advice in the jurisdiction where each asset sits, and your English solicitor should be able to help you with this. Failing to do that can result in a messy probate at a moment when your family already has enough to deal with.
For business owners, the questions are layered. Are the business assets held by the company or by you personally? Is there a shareholder or partnership agreement that restricts what you can do with your shares on death? If you have children, are some more involved in the business than others? These are conversations to have before drafting, not after.
Blended families add another dimension. A common structure in second marriages is to give a surviving spouse an income interest in the estate while preserving the capital for children from a previous relationship. That structure works, but it requires careful consideration of the ages involved, the relationships between stepparent and stepchildren, the tax implications, and how long the wait for the capital might realistically be.
Tax: Getting the Efficiency Right Without Losing Sight of the Point
As a basic starting point, inheritance tax will be charged at 40% on the value of your estate above your available nil-rate bands, after reliefs and exemptions. Examples include the spouse exemption and charity exemption, and business property relief, which, if available, may shelter significant value in qualifying business assets.
Two opportunities that are often missed are as follows: First, using the spouse exemption as a route to pass assets to children. Giving a spouse a life interest in your whole estate with overriding powers for trustees to appoint assets to children during that spouse’s lifetime can, in some cases, be more efficient than a direct legacy to the children. Second: the 36% rate of inheritance tax available when at least 10% of elements of the estate passes to charity. Someone already planning to leave, say, 9% to charitable causes, might find that topping up to 10% reduces the overall tax charge enough that both their chosen charities and their beneficiaries end up better off.
Don’t let the tax tail wag the dog. The efficiency is in service of the people you want to benefit, not the other way around.
The broader principle from Verity and Clarissa was clear: tax planning should be in service of your intentions, not in place of them. Working out who you want to benefit and why, and then structuring your will to achieve that as efficiently as possible, is the right order of operations.
Trusts, LPAs, and the Documents That Sit Alongside a Will
Trusts can be created under a will to hold assets rather than passing them outright to a beneficiary. They are worth considering where beneficiaries are young or vulnerable, where you want to give different people different entitlements, or where you want to retain some control over timing. Setting an age contingency in your will, for example specifying that a child inherits at 25, automatically creates a trust interest. Trustees can still release capital for specific purposes, such as education or a house purchase, while the main sum is held back.
Most pensions are likely to pass outside the terms of a will and are governed by nomination forms submitted directly to the pension provider. Those are therefore worth reviewing at the same time as your will. From April 2027, pensions are being brought into the inheritance tax net, which adds further urgency to looking at pension nominations as part of the overall picture.
Lasting Powers of Attorney deal with what happens during your lifetime if you lose mental capacity and who can make decisions on your behalf, not what happens on your death. A property and financial affairs LPA appoints trusted individuals to manage your assets if you become unable to do so yourself. A health and welfare LPA appoints individuals to make decisions about your care and treatment. You can have different attorneys under each, and it is even possible to have separate property and financial affairs LPAs for business and personal assets. Without these documents in place, the alternative is an application to the Court of Protection to appoint a deputy, which is slow, costly, and takes control entirely out of your hands at what can be a very stressful time.
A letter of wishes is another document worth knowing about. It sits alongside a will, is private unlike the will itself (which becomes public once it enters probate), and gives trustees and executors guidance about how you would like discretion to be exercised. It is not legally binding, but it carries weight.
Where Wills Go Wrong
There are certain pitfalls it is worth keeping in mind at the planning stage, to mitigate against wills becoming contentious. A key example is failing to consider whether someone who is not named as a beneficiary might have a claim against the estate. English law allows freedom of disposition, but certain categories of person, including spouses and dependants you were maintaining at the time of death, can make claims against the estate. Identifying those potential claims at the planning stage and deciding how to address them is far better than leaving your executors to navigate them when the time comes.
Pre-nuptial and post-nuptial agreements can be another source of conflict when ignored. Many of these agreements include provisions about how a spouse should be provided for on death. A will that contradicts those agreements creates exactly the kind of dispute that good planning is meant to prevent.
And international assets, again: a forced heirship regime that was not factored in at the planning stage can override choices made in an English will and result in a probate process that is significantly more complicated than it needed to be.
Talking to the Next Generation
Inheritance conversations are emotionally charged, and there is no universal script for how to have them. Clarissa’s advice was straightforward: start as soon as the children are mature enough, manage expectations where you can, and accept that every family is different. The dynamics between siblings, stepchildren, spouses, and business partners are too varied for any single formula.
Where families struggle to have these conversations, involving a professional early can help structure the discussion and take some of the interpersonal weight out of it. An adviser who has seen hundreds of different family configurations is not going to be surprised by a complicated sibling relationship or an uncomfortable business structure. That familiarity is part of what makes the conversation easier to have.
The First Step
The most practical advice from Verity for anyone who has been putting this off: get the ball rolling and pick up the phone. Starting the conversation makes everything feel less daunting than it looks from the outside, and any adviser who does this day in and day out will have heard every version of the situation you think makes yours unusually complicated.
It is worth having a sense of what you have first: start off by listing your assets, to understand roughly what they are worth, and then consider any debts or liabilities. This will really help you and your adviser put together a sensible succession plan.
A plan, even an imperfect one, or a work in progress for future revision, is better than no plan. That is the point. The intestacy rules do not know your family, your business, your wishes, or your circumstances. Your will does.
For further information, please get in touch with Clarissa Ferguson or Verity Sherwin. Alternatively, telephone on 020 7465 4300
