| As the director responsible
for wills, estate planning and estate administration,
Hannah is often on the receiving end of jokes about
the less cheerful aspects of her work. When we sat down
over a cup of coffee with Hannah, we found that she
has a startlingly different way of seeing the contribution
made by her team.
Preparing
a will is probably at the bottom of most people's list
of Things to Do. I am often astonished
at how many young people believe that making a will
is something they can put off until they are much older.
Young families, in particular, need the benefits of
a properly-drawn will.
Be careful
of DIY wills - unless your life is very simple, you're
just not doing yourself justice by filling in the blanks.
A will is the one thing you can't change, so you need
to make sure that you get it right. Once you are gone,
your heirs will have to live with the long-term consequences
of your will.
We help
clients ask "what if" questions.
People tend to focus on the here and now. The most common
mistake made in preparing a will is failing to anticipate
changes that might happen between the time when you
make the will and the time of death. We help clients
take the extra step with questions like: What if your
spouse goes first? What if you both die in a car accident?
Who will be the executor and who will be inherit in
these circumstances?
Most of
us don't give enough thought to preserving our wealth
for the next generation. We work hard
all our lives to build up some wealth, but this wealth
is easily eroded if you are not careful. Estate planning
is about organizing your assets so that your heirs pay
less tax, especially estate duty. Trusts are one of
the main tools of estate planning. The idea is to shift
assets out of your estate and into a trust. The result
is that your estate is reduced and less estate duty
is payable. Trusts also have a more immediate benefit
in that you can split income on the trust assets amongst
the trust beneficiaries. This is useful if your bene-ficiaries
pay tax at a lower rate than you do.
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The
biggest challenge with trusts is avoiding the temptation
to control trust assets as if they were still your
own. There is a definite trade-off
with trusts: if you want the tax benefits of a trust,
you have to recognize that the trust's assets are
legally no longer your own. If you fail to make this
mind shift, you stand the risk of a court deciding
that the trust is a sham and that its assets should
be taxed as if they were your own. There are, of course,
ways to structure trusts so that the benefactor's
interests are protected.
Estate
administration is about wrapping up a person's estate
after death. It is an extremely difficult
time for the heirs and the aim is to complete the
administration process as quickly as possible. This
brings finality to a difficult time and ensures that
heirs gain access to their inheritance as soon as
possible.
Not
everybody's affairs are in apple-pie order! Not
everybody has a neat collection of the many documents
required to wind up an estate. We welcome those boxes
of unsorted documents that have been sitting at the
bottom of a cupboard. We are here to lessen the burden
for bereaved relatives.
My view
of my work changed forever when I saw my own father's
file at the Master's office. The Master
of the High Court is responsible for over-seeing the
wrapping up of estates and I had to check the file
dealing with my father's estate for some reason. I
realized with a shock that my father's life had, in
a sense, been reduced to a rather thin brown file
in a grey government building. I resolved there and
then to never make a client feel that his or her loved
one is just another file to us.
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ffee
with hannah
