Am I being offered a fair price for Probate service?

andyeyeam

My Father recently died and his will leaves everything to his wife. They jointly own a house worth around £700K. They have around £600K in cash, stock funds, premium bonds, and a few other things like that, of which some are jointly owned and some are co-owned. A local solicitors are quoting around £7,000 .inc VAT, to arrange probate and administer the estate. It seems a lot. Does this seem reasonable? All help gratefully received,

andyeyeam

Where I wrote "co-owned", I meant "individually owned"

elsien

Who is the executor of the estate, is that you?
it seems a fairly straightforward estate. 

The house would automatically go to her anyway if it was jointly owned so falls out of his estate, as to any other jointly owned assets I suspect. 

If you were so inclined it’s something that you should be able to do yourself. With the help of the good people on here if you get stuck at any point.

lisyloo

I would do it yourself.
we’ll help you out if you need it - and charge a lot less

maisie_cat

I recently did MIL's, everything either jointly owned with FIL or solely owned but below IHT. FIL was sole beneficiary. I did it online and it was 2 months from DOD to Probate Grant arriving on our doormat. FIL was quoted £1200 by a solicitor.

Keep_pedalling

As everything is going to your mother this is an excepted estate and there will be no IHT return required, so it is a relatively simple task to apply for probate yourself. This can be done on-line once you have all his assets identified.

https://www.gov.uk/applying-for-probate/apply-for-probate

Your mother’s assets now exceed her IHT exemptions so she might like to think about gifting to get it below £1M which would save around £40k in IHT is she survives 7 years after making the gift.

Sarahspangles

I have prepared two applications recently.  Most of the effort was in assembling, collating and recording  information and the actual completion of the online forms was relatively easy, even more so with the most recent one, on the new HMCTS system.  We had email notification of the grant of probate exactly a month after posting the Will off.

If the solicitors’ service includes making lots of the notifications and assumes a bit of detective work will be needed with creditors or lost accounts I can see how costs would mount up.  And you may just want to hand it all over - being on the in-law side has made this easier for me than it would have been for the actual Executors, actively grieving.

BooJewels

As others have said, it's easy enough to do yourself, if you're inclined.  For the most part, the Probate application process requires information to be put into a form.  As you'll have to supply this information to the solicitor anyway, they end up being expensive form fillers, when you've already done most of the work for them.

My own personal approach on a spousal estate would be to wait and see if anyone actually requires and asks for the grant of probate before even applying.  It may be required for solo held assets with balances above the organisations threshold, but if all accounts have low enough balances, it may not be needed.  I'm just starting to execute an estate myself and will need probate to sell the property, but in her papers I was surprised to find that she'd needed probate for her husband's modest estate, purely because most of his solo assets were shares and even with small balances it was seemingly required in order to sell them. NS&I require probate for PBs above £5k.

Twice in conversation recently, a solicitor has offered to do probate for us for 1% of the estate value, so your £7k is in line with that.

SiliconChip

I have to agree with everyone else that it should be relatively easy to DIY the probate. Attention to detail, good record keeping, and double checking are the key attributes you'll need.

As @BooJewels has said it's likely that shares and possibly NS&I will require probate. Dealing with the shares is likely to be the trickiest part of the process, you'll probably need to correspond for a while with the share registrars to achieve the desired result (either sale of the shares or transfer into your mother's name) but I found that it was possible even with the slightly more complicated situation I had to deal with (shares still in my late father's name that were in my mother's estate after her death).

Pennylane

My paperwork is all in the loft now but I think it cost me just less than £250 to do the Probate myself on the Gov. Site. Very straightforward.  Things is if you get a solicitor to do it you are providing them with all the info anyway so they are just transferring it to the forms. 

BooJewels

The current fee for the Probate application is now a flat fee of £273 @Pennylane.  I also paid about £250 for the last one I did when it was a sliding scale, relative to the estate value.