Joint bank accounts following a death...

rafikiphoto

My wife and I have joint current and savings bank accounts. In the event of the death of one of us is the other still able to operate those joint accounts in the immediate aftermath? We are with First Direct (HSBC) and have made our Wills.

18cc

A quick Google of the question will find multiple hits from law firms rather than a banking forum. The usual position is that on death of one of the account holders, the joint account will pass by the rule of survivorship to the surviving account holder but there are exceptions...

greyteam1959

As with all things banking it would be sensible to have another back up account just in case of problems ( not only death ).
Same with credit cards, it always pay to have more than one.

Keep_pedalling

The survivor is unlikely to run into any difficulty in those circumstances, but you should also both consider the situation of one or both of you being incapacitated by illness or accident and should put lasting powers of attorney (LPA) in place as well.

Joint bank accounts can usually be operated jointly and severally, but other jointly owned assets such as your home can’t, so if one of you lost mental capacity and the other wanted to move into a more suitable home you would be stuck.

The same applies to solely owned assets such as ISAs which you might need access to to pay care costs or home adaptions.

born_again

I would ask the question with your banks.
Some might freeze the account until they see a death cert and copy of the will.
But some people forget to tell their banks with everything else going on for a while. As it's not exactly a top priority.

Flobberchops

rafikiphoto wrote: »

My wife and I have joint current and savings bank accounts. In the event of the death of one of us is the other still able to operate those joint accounts in the immediate aftermath?

Without reading the Ts&Cs, I'll hazard a response. Yes.



As the other posters have suggested, this arrangement is of course no replacement for life insurance, a will, PoA etc (as appropriate) but the surviving party will generally be able to access money in a formerly joint account, yes. This obviously has advantages for dealing with funeral costs and other immediate fallout of an untimely death.

jonesMUFCforever

Yes - a joint account will go to the survivor - there are two exceptions I can think of - if an account was frozen due to a dispute prior to death, or if the account was overdrawn on date of death.