Estate Planning Solicitors in Stockport

When it comes to inheritance tax, understanding your obligations is essential to ensuring your loved ones benefit from your estate as intended. Under the Inheritance Tax Act 1984, inheritance tax generally does not apply if your estate is below £325,000, or if you leave everything to your spouse, civil partner, or a charity. This threshold can increase to £500,000 if you choose to pass your estate directly to children or grandchildren.

For estates exceeding these thresholds, inheritance tax is set at 40% on the amount above the limit. For example, if your estate is valued at £330,000, with a threshold of £325,000, the tax would only apply to the excess £5,000, resulting in an inheritance tax charge of £2,000.

Leaving your estate to a spouse or civil partner not only exempts them from inheritance tax but also allows your unused tax-free allowance to transfer to them. This means a married couple can collectively leave up to £1 million without incurring inheritance tax, providing substantial relief to your beneficiaries.

Certain professions, including members of the armed forces, police, paramedics, firefighters, and some aid workers, may also be exempt from inheritance tax if the individual passes away due to injuries sustained in active service.

The responsibility for managing inheritance tax falls to the executors named in the Will. They must gather assets, settle tax obligations with HM Revenue and Customs, and distribute the estate as outlined. If there is no Will, this duty shifts to the administrators. Our experienced estate planning solicitors are here to support executors and administrators alike, ensuring that every step is handled with clarity and precision during what can be a challenging time.

Our Estate Planning Lawyers at Mounteney are well-equipped to guide you through all aspects of inheritance tax planning, ensuring that your estate is structured in a way that minimises tax liability and maximises the benefit to your beneficiaries.

Professionals tend to like to work within the comfort of their own professional remits – lawyers tend to stick to legal work, accountants to accountancy, tax adviser to tax, Financial Advisers to investment advice, etc.

Our Terms and Conditions certainly seek to limit the remit of our advice as lawyers to legal work only – see clause 2(b) that seeks to exclude our advising on taxation (especially S.D.L.T. / W.L.T.T.), accountancy, finance / investment, insurance, valuation, survey, planning, building regulations, and environmental liabilities and obligations.

This general professional tendency to “stream” services, narrowly, can render it difficult for clients to get general advice across professional disciplines, when that is required. Our Estate Review service attempts to address this issue: the product is for our engagement with you to assess what professional services, including legal services, you might need to engage efficiently and appropriately to structure your affairs, and in particular tax, accounting, finance, investment and insurance – and we may also make any recommendation you request as to such services that could be co-ordinated with any legal services you might require for us, or from legal experts we might recommend be engaged for you.

This product is for spending a couple of hours on your behalf, taking instructions to understand your criteria, and making basic recommendations of “next steps”. Actioning our recommendations beyond our review but as a result of it would then be quoted and charged, extra, as appropriate.

The Estate Review is a service that we can undertake in less a few hours once we can schedule it in our workflow, that can depend on how busy we are at any particular time. We would not usually take-on a job for which we could not engage within about a working week.

This is a complete Estate Planning Package to which there are three parts – a Trust Will if required, otherwise Simple Will, LPAs and Family Protection Trust. This package is designed to avoid the complications of modern family structures and therefore the numerous threats that can prevent your estate from reaching your chosen beneficiaries.

Carefully considered planning of the financial affairs of your estate is essential to ensure that you can pass on the maximum benefit to your beneficiaries. There are now many ways in which your family’s inheritance can be diluted or even lost; from expensive legal fees to divorce, financial problems and Inheritance Tax. All of these can be avoided with carefully considered planning.

The time required for estate planning varies based on your specific needs. For simpler cases, like drafting a Will or setting up a Lasting Power of Attorney, the process can often be completed in a few weeks. However, if your estate plan involves more detailed arrangements—such as creating Trusts, managing Transfer of Equity, or establishing a Family Protection Trust—it may take longer to ensure all aspects are accurately addressed.

At Mounteney Solicitors, our Estate Planning Lawyers are experienced in handling complex estates and can coordinate services like Trusts & Trustee Services, Transfer of Equity & Trust, and Family Protection Trusts with efficiency. We’ll guide you through each step, ensuring your estate plan meets your goals while protecting your family’s future. Once your plan is in place, we recommend periodic reviews to keep it aligned with any changes in your personal or financial circumstances.