Family Protection Trust Solicitors

Trusts have become a vital financial planning tool for ordinary people with relatively modest assets. A Family Protection Trust (FPT) is a deed which is simple and inexpensive to establish and then acts as a legal “safe deposit box” for your assets designed to protect your estate against tax and probate charges.

Unless you create an FPT, then before any of your assets can be passed on as you intended, various tax, local authority and legal people may receive part of your estate. Even if you don’t think of yourself as rich, your successors may lose thousands of pounds which you intended them to enjoy.

An FPT can eliminate probate costs and enable your estate to be administered more efficiently.

Your FPT can achieve many planned beneficial outcomes including:

• Creating a family wealth protection tool that can be used for up to 125 years
• Control over the handling and distribution of assets
• Possible tax benefits if combined with specific investment advice
• Faster, cheaper distribution after death
• Protection of assets from family circumstances and creditors.

An FPT provides access to your hard-earned wealth at all times – it can be cancelled subject to the costs of doing so.

By locking-up your assets in the Trust you can protect them – from family circumstances such as second families or divorces, or from financial disaster such as bankruptcy- and also from creditors: and whilst we would not recommend establishing a Family Trust as a method of deliberately removing assets from means testing, where the Family Trust is being set up for the other reasons mentioned, then the assets held within the Trust should not be taken into account for the purpose of assessing your liability for care home fees.

There can be arguments about what your motivation for setting up the Trust was, but under current rules Local Authorities are told that they should not infer that someone has deliberately tried to remove assets form means testing if at the time the Trust is set up you are in good health and not likely to go into care in the foreseeable future. Future legislation may of course bring changes, but as things stand you may be able to save many thousands of pounds in care home fees.

Everybody planning for their future should consider making an FPT. Couples often wish to make “mirror” FPTs whose provisions reflect one another.