Your estate includes not only your money, but also any property and business assets you own. To pass ownership to the right people, you must effectively plan for the future. This includes declaring how assets will be distributed, who will administer your will and inheritance, and whether you want any of your assets to be stored in trusts or given to charities.

Good succession planning can help to ensure that your family or business beneficiaries not only receive their share of your estate in due course, but that they get the most out of it. This includes reducing the amount you will be taxed and ensuring the process runs smoothly.

In order to achieve this, you should consider employing a succession planning solicitor, such as those at JMW, who have a deep understanding of the laws surrounding estates and have vast experience in providing succession planning services for a variety of clients.

If you want to build and maintain an estate over the course of your life, proper succession planning with the help of expert solicitors can minimise inheritance taxes and help you to protect against future payments for care homes or healthcare. The sooner this planning is implemented, the better.

Additionally, succession planning can help you plan for illness. If you lose mental capacity at any point in the future, you may not be able to handle your finances. Without preparing in advance for this type of outcome, your finances may be managed in a manner that contradicts your wishes, or you may end up paying more tax on them, all of which could affect beneficiaries of your will.

The main reason for ensuring your inheritance will be handled properly and to optimum financial benefit is to provide support for your family. After passing away, management of your estate can be very important to the success of both your personal wealth and business assets, and good succession planning will improve the chances of this.

We can help you to find ways to reduce the Inheritance Tax your family must pay on your estate. By dedicating some of your estate to charity, setting up trusts, or donating some of your estate before your passing, you can reduce your tax band and qualify for a lower payment. With some fine-tuning, we can help you optimise your estate so that you will reduce the amount of IHT you owe, while still maintaining a large amount of your estate to be received by your family or business.

When you have a large estate and want to reduce its size in order to avoid paying more tax, you can employ trusts, which enable you to give away aspects of your estate without losing out. 

As well as reducing your tax, setting up trusts can help to ensure that the people who receive that part of your estate use it for the right reasons. For example, if you set up a house as part of a trust, you can register yourself or someone else as a trustee, meaning you can manage what is done with that house - for instance, whether it can be sold or who it goes to. You can also appoint a solicitor as a trustee.

If you own a business, passing it on is possible through appropriate succession planning. Our solicitors can help you to decide who you should appoint as your successor(s), ensure you maintain some control of the running of the business after you have stepped down, and reduce any impact of IHT or capital gains tax.

We will also make sure that other members of your family who are not going to inherit the business will be provided for - something of particular importance for those with farming businesses and rural estates.

Our team will work with you to ensure that your estate is structured in the best way possible to pass on your business or farm successfully.

Depending on the property that you hold in any other countries, different succession laws, tax rules and cultural laws may apply, and these can often change. For this reason, it is important to employ the services of expert solicitors, as our team will be able to learn exactly what tax regulations apply, and can assess how best to have that estate returned to your family or business.