Resigning as a trustee

boingy

As the title says, I want to step down from being a trustee in our three family trusts. I don't want to go into the reasons for this decision.

At present, the solicitors who set up the trusts are telling me they have to "prepare retirement documents" on my behalf at a cost of £200 + VAT per trust, a total of £720.

Does this sound normal and reasonable? The solicitors have no stake in the trusts other than having set them up in the first place. I was naively expecting to just write a resignation letter to the other trustees and maybe a small admin fee for adding a note or similar to the trust documents. There will not be a replacement trustee. 

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing?
Can I produce the retirement documents myself?
Can I use a different, hopefully cheaper, solicitor to do it?

 

Marcon

boingy said:

As the title says, I want to step down from being a trustee in our three family trusts. I don't want to go into the reasons for this decision.

At present, the solicitors who set up the trusts are telling me they have to "prepare retirement documents" on my behalf at a cost of £200 + VAT per trust, a total of £720.

Does this sound normal and reasonable? The solicitors have no stake in the trusts other than having set them up in the first place. I was naively expecting to just write a resignation letter to the other trustees and maybe a small admin fee for adding a note or similar to the trust documents. There will not be a replacement trustee. 

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing?
Can I produce the retirement documents myself?
Can I use a different, hopefully cheaper, solicitor to do it?

 

If your retirement has to be done under deed, then those costs aren't unreasonable. Unlikely you'll find a solicitor who is interested in doing it more cheaply; by the time they've set you up as a new client it won't be worth their while just to do such a small one-off piece of work.

boingy

Marcon said:

boingy said:

As the title says, I want to step down from being a trustee in our three family trusts. I don't want to go into the reasons for this decision.

At present, the solicitors who set up the trusts are telling me they have to "prepare retirement documents" on my behalf at a cost of £200 + VAT per trust, a total of £720.

Does this sound normal and reasonable? The solicitors have no stake in the trusts other than having set them up in the first place. I was naively expecting to just write a resignation letter to the other trustees and maybe a small admin fee for adding a note or similar to the trust documents. There will not be a replacement trustee. 

Does anyone have any experience of this sort of thing?
Can I produce the retirement documents myself?
Can I use a different, hopefully cheaper, solicitor to do it?

 

If your retirement has to be done under deed, then those costs aren't unreasonable. Unlikely you'll find a solicitor who is interested in doing it more cheaply; by the time they've set you up as a new client it won't be worth their while just to do such a small one-off piece of work.

Thanks, I was afraid someone was going to say that!

Weirdly I'd be a new client to the solicitors in question too because I have never engaged them before - other family members looked after setting up the trusts and also the bill last year for registering the trusts with HMRC - £1500. So far the only beneficiaries of these trusts and the one that preceded seem to be the solicitors. They also have the disadvantage that they are about 250 miles away so a local solicitor would be a better fit for me. I guess I bite my tongue, stump up the cash and then I'm done with them. Oh, unless someone has a time machine so I can pop back to 2005 and just not get involved in the first place...