Child inheritance

Missjinty

Missjinty said:

I need some advice.  My 13 year old son and his 3 year old brother (from another mother) are sole beneficiaries to their fathers estate.  He passed away intestate in October 2018.  Fathers family took control of the estate and instructed solicitors to apply for letters of administration in Jan 19, this application was not done until June 19.  The solicitors have refused to update me on the situation.  The sister who is supposed to be the administrator (does not know if solicitor has letters of administration nor that grant of probate has been granted), she says the solicitors hardly communicate with her.  The mortgage company took repossession of the house in December 19, they refuse to communicate with the sister as she does not have a grant of probate and marketed the house for sale via agents in March 19.  I made the family and the solicitors aware of this and was told they had stopped the sale completing.  I was not updated further.  I have now learned the property was sold and sale completed on the 25th August 2020.  People have moved in.  The  land registry still is in the name of my sons father.  The family solicitors are not responding at all and their website says they are closed due to COVID.  who can i contact and where is the boys inheritance.  Any direction is appreciated.  I have checked on the gov probate and it does not appear to have been issued

xylophone

Fathers family took control of the estate and instructed solicitors to apply for letters of administration in Jan 19, this application was not done until June 19. 

Is a family member  to be named as administrator? Or is it to be the solicitor?

The solicitors have refused to update me on the situation.  The sister who is supposed to be the administrator (does not know if solicitor has letters of administration nor that grant of probate has been granted), she says the solicitors hardly communicate with her. 

You are not their client.  It appears that the boys' aunt is.  The fact that the solicitor's office is closed does not mean that he is not working. 

Have you tried this

https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/#wills

You need to identify the Administrator in order to make progress.

Flugelhorn

Agree need to find the administrator 

seeing the mortgage company repossessed implies that there was a lot of money owed / no life insurance - one thing to be aware of is that there may not be any money in the estate for your son and his half sib to inherit 

Malthusian

If the estate is being administered, wouldn't a mortgage company wait to be repaid from the sale of the house, rather than going to the expense of doing the job themselves by repossessing?

I am wondering if the estate was effectively insolvent (or nearly insolvent) and upon realising this, the aunt essentially walked away. Legally, once you start administering an estate you have to finish, but practically, that matters little if nobody cares enough to make you. (And it is cheaper for a creditor to pay lawyers to take over the administration of an estate than to pay lawyers to force a layperson to correctly complete the administration of an estate.)

The OP - and their son - have at least a moral right to know whether there is any money coming. (If you are old enough to be tried as an adult you are old enough to know how much money you own, even if you aren't in control of it. Also, in the absence of anything the OP isn't telling us, she is the natural choice for Trustee of any money her son inherited, not his aunt.) However, if the aunt gave it up as a bad job and the solicitors don't care because their client gave it up as a bad job and they aren't going to get paid, that would explain why nobody has had the courtesy to tell the OP "he had no money left and we couldn't be bothered".

OP - how do you know there is any money left to inherit?