Trust Wills - experiences, feedback and thoughts

suffbet3

Hi,

I’m after people’s experiences of Trust Wills as I’m currently looking at one myself after a conversation with Co-op’s will services. We’re recently married and have one child, and won’t be having any more. We own our house outright and our assets are heavily weighted towards my savings and investments. As far as what we want it’s pretty straightforward, if either of us die everything goes to the other partner, when they die everything goes to our child.

We’d originally called for the basic mirrored wills but the advisor discussed the merits of a Trust Will to protect our childs share of assets in the future from either a re-marriage where they may not be provided for in the will and to protect their share if one of us needed to go into care.

I was particularly interested in how people have found accessing money from the Trust upon death of a partner, is it easy to set up and access cash or is it a slow process, we would be having a couple of close family members as Trustees. Also I’ve seen various discussions on other types of ‘Trusts’ where the protection of assets from care home assessment costs doesn’t seem watertight and can be classed as ‘deliberate deprivation of assets’ by local authorities, again any experiences of this and how a Trust Will would differ.

As well as changing our title with the land registry to be Tenants in Common so we can decide where a share of the house can go ie 50% to our child, the advisor recommended sorting the weighting of the assets out between me and my partner so it becomes more equal, when he explained the reasons why it made sense, a few days down the line I’m struggling to remember! Why is that different to what you’d do in a normal Will?

I have a follow up call with the advisor to clarify some of the above but I’d be interested to hear people’s real world experiences of Trust Wills whether good or bad.

Many thanks in advance.

Keep_pedalling

These normally take the form of immediate post-death interest trusts in which the surviving spouse becomes the beneficial owner and the trust the legal owner which might be fine for the family home but gets horrible complicated for cash and other liquid assets.

As you are both still young maybe a better option would be to make sure a the surviving spouse is well cared for financially through life insurance to cover the mortgage and the cost of caring for your child for the next n years and leave your child a portion of your wealth which would need to be held in trust until they are 18. 

suffbet3

Keep_pedalling said:

These normally take the form of immediate post-death interest trusts in which the surviving spouse becomes the beneficial owner and the trust the legal owner which might be fine for the family home but gets horrible complicated for cash and other liquid assets.

Thank you for your comments. Our Mortgage is actually paid off so that's all sorted, and we both have good death in benefit provision through our employers. If the management of savings and investments via a Trust is somewhat involved and complex, perhaps I could look at just put the property into Trust, which I believe you can do?