Dad recently died and need to deal with his estate/selling the house

jem16

RAS said:

Thanks might be useful to have advice from @buddy9 ?

Just checking the Home Insurance policy documents. I know I had told them that my brother and I owned half the house in a Liferent trust after my Mum died in March but I had forgotten they’d added us as Joint Policyholders as well as holding POA for Dad. It also stipulates house not to be unoccupied for more than 60 days which nicely takes us up to the policy end date of 9th March. Hopefully that gives us a bit of breathing space to apply for Confirmation. 

WindfallWendy

So sorry for your loss, and I hope you are able to work well with your brother on this. 

I did this myself for my own fathers passing a couple of years ago, so my recollection is a tad dusty (and also based on England rules) but for what it's worth...

Fill in the IHT check online, to get some of the values/numbers you need for Probate. You can run the check multiple times, but keep note of the values you use, so when you actually submit the probate form, you know the numbers you've used.

Probate takes up to 16 weeks (at least that was the target then), but in my experience, they didn't even look at the paperwork until the 16 week deadline came. Then they needed to refer to the witnesses of the Will, because the original will wasn't stapled together so they wanted to check that the Will I sent them was complete. So - be patient! But don't be put off by Probate. You can do it really quickly as long as you have figures for the values of the different aspects of the estate. Hopefully it's quite straight forward for you.

Estate agents will do a Probate valuation for you. I assume it's the same in Scotland. Everything has to be based on the value at the date of death. If there are significant personal effects you might want to get an official valuation (e.g. I got a Rolex valued just to make sure the beneficiaries didn't kick up a fuss if I decided to hold on to it).

You can clear the house and start to market the house before probate comes through, but you can't legally sell it until you have Probate. For less valuable items e.g. cars (or at least, my Dad's old Landrover, and his old Stair lift) you can sell these things without Probate - but of course you should include their value as part of the Estate, don't forget. I had a spreadsheet listing out things of some value, to help work out the overall value, but things like white goods and furniture aren't worth all that much, so don't agonise over it. But selling a few things like this helps keep some cash if you need it for any ongoing expenses (especially if your brother is living there). 

Executor accounts come with additional rules. The bank accounts my Dad left weren't of very high value (£2-3000) so they just passed the money to me and I could pay bills quite easily and didn't need an Executor account. The only reason I set one up was to help facilitate the payments to beneficiaries when the time came, but you can of course just go into branch to make very large bank transfers to people. So I don't personally think an Executor account is needed. However, there are two of you involved so you might prefer to. You'll both need to be available to sign things though. 

Bills - The energy company were wonderful and said "don't worry until you have sold the house" (Octopus). I loved them for that. They sent me monthly bills to so I knew how much was building up. But they were not demanding.
Council tax - with no one living there it was exempt for 12 months, but they didn't offer any refund until after the house was sold. Might be different in Scotland, but these were definitely the worst people to deal with.
Internet - VIrgin - they were fabulous and worked around the circumstances.
TV licence - nightmare. I cancelled immediately and they followed up after 3 months saying "is anything living there now?" Very rude.
Pensions people were lovely.
Equity Release people got very demanding after 8 months. I did not appreciate them at all.
Debts of course come off the value of the Estate. Some people (e.g. credit cards) just wrote the debt off, which is handy as then they don't chase you. Even then, a £12k loan my Dad had was happily written off by the bank when I said I didn't have the cash to pay it off. But then of course when we sold the house we DID have the cash to pay it back, so I did the honourable thing and paid it. I didn't need that hanging over my head, as I was having to do tax returns for my Dad too, which is a whole other story!

Sorry, this is a lot of information, but hopefully some nuggets that might help. Good luck, look after yourselves and yell if there is anything here that you want to know more about. 

jem16

WindfallWendy said:

So sorry for your loss, and I hope you are able to work well with your brother on this. 

I did this myself for my own fathers passing a couple of years ago, so my recollection is a tad dusty (and also based on England rules) but for what it's worth...

Fill in the IHT check online, to get some of the values/numbers you need for Probate. You can run the check multiple times, but keep note of the values you use, so when you actually submit the probate form, you know the numbers you've used.

Probate takes up to 16 weeks (at least that was the target then), but in my experience, they didn't even look at the paperwork until the 16 week deadline came. Then they needed to refer to the witnesses of the Will, because the original will wasn't stapled together so they wanted to check that the Will I sent them was complete. So - be patient! But don't be put off by Probate. You can do it really quickly as long as you have figures for the values of the different aspects of the estate. Hopefully it's quite straight forward for you.

Estate agents will do a Probate valuation for you. I assume it's the same in Scotland. Everything has to be based on the value at the date of death. If there are significant personal effects you might want to get an official valuation (e.g. I got a Rolex valued just to make sure the beneficiaries didn't kick up a fuss if I decided to hold on to it).

You can clear the house and start to market the house before probate comes through, but you can't legally sell it until you have Probate. For less valuable items e.g. cars (or at least, my Dad's old Landrover, and his old Stair lift) you can sell these things without Probate - but of course you should include their value as part of the Estate, don't forget. I had a spreadsheet listing out things of some value, to help work out the overall value, but things like white goods and furniture aren't worth all that much, so don't agonise over it. But selling a few things like this helps keep some cash if you need it for any ongoing expenses (especially if your brother is living there). 

Executor accounts come with additional rules. The bank accounts my Dad left weren't of very high value (£2-3000) so they just passed the money to me and I could pay bills quite easily and didn't need an Executor account. The only reason I set one up was to help facilitate the payments to beneficiaries when the time came, but you can of course just go into branch to make very large bank transfers to people. So I don't personally think an Executor account is needed. However, there are two of you involved so you might prefer to. You'll both need to be available to sign things though. 

Bills - The energy company were wonderful and said "don't worry until you have sold the house" (Octopus). I loved them for that. They sent me monthly bills to so I knew how much was building up. But they were not demanding.
Council tax - with no one living there it was exempt for 12 months, but they didn't offer any refund until after the house was sold. Might be different in Scotland, but these were definitely the worst people to deal with.
Internet - VIrgin - they were fabulous and worked around the circumstances.
TV licence - nightmare. I cancelled immediately and they followed up after 3 months saying "is anything living there now?" Very rude.
Pensions people were lovely.
Equity Release people got very demanding after 8 months. I did not appreciate them at all.
Debts of course come off the value of the Estate. Some people (e.g. credit cards) just wrote the debt off, which is handy as then they don't chase you. Even then, a £12k loan my Dad had was happily written off by the bank when I said I didn't have the cash to pay it off. But then of course when we sold the house we DID have the cash to pay it back, so I did the honourable thing and paid it. I didn't need that hanging over my head, as I was having to do tax returns for my Dad too, which is a whole other story!

Sorry, this is a lot of information, but hopefully some nuggets that might help. Good luck, look after yourselves and yell if there is anything here that you want to know more about. 

Thanks you. That’s very helpful. Dad’s energy company is Octopus so good to hear they’re great with it.

We will be using the lawyer to deal with the estate as we did with Mum’s purely because of the Liferent Trust that was set up as Mum left her half of the house to my brother and I. I think this might mean that Council Tax will not be exempted and will fall to the Trust (Estate). 

Mostly it will fall to me to deal with as my brother lives in England. He’s only here for the week to help out. He will be back for the funeral but apart from that I doubt it. 

Brie

Get your brother to have a good look at what's in the house and talk to you about what, if anything, he might want.  It's rare to have 2 people who like exactly the same thing or are able to deal with non valuable stuff in the same way.  I went through a lot of stuff my mom had accumulated with one of my siblings and while he would sit there and read through old newspaper cuttings and hum and hah over what should be saved and who it might be given to I was quite quick to bin a lot.  We've still got things to sort out but with siblings in different time zones we need to do things from a distance and trust that each of the others is doing as we might all agree.  We have a lot of zoom calls which makes it easier rather than depending on emails - but if it's just the 2 of you that won't be as big a problem hopefully.

Sorry for your loss - do give yourself and your brother time to take it all in.