What I learnt when I wrote my will (Podcast cut)
This is Money Podcast
This is Money
4.1 • 650 Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2018
⏱️ 5 minutes
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Summary
In this five minute guide to what you need to think about when writing your will, This is Money editor Simon Lambert explains what he discovered when he wrote his - and the things you need to consider.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What do you put in it? Well, it says who you are, what you're leaving, who you're leaving it to, |
| 0:05.4 | you name your executors, those are the people who you want to be responsible for carrying out |
| 0:09.7 | your wishes and doing the process of probate where they collect all of your assets and then divvy |
| 0:13.9 | them up and hand them out. And if you've got children, you name any guardians. So those are the |
| 0:18.3 | basics. But then there's some more things that you need |
| 0:21.0 | to think about. So it's a good time to work out what you've got. Now, you don't need an exact list |
| 0:25.9 | to the penny of what you're worth, but it's very good to have a ballpark figure. So that's your |
| 0:30.9 | house, if you've got one, minus the mortgage, any savings, any investment counts or products. Also think about do you have a pension and do you have life insurance? |
| 0:39.4 | So a pension sits outside of your estate and you can pass that on relatively tax-friendly nowadays. |
| 0:44.4 | Life insurance, if you do have it, you need to make sure that it is written in trust. |
| 0:49.3 | And if your life insurance is written in trust, it sits outside of your estate. |
| 0:53.3 | Don't ask why weird arcane reasons. |
| 0:56.0 | But not only is it not counted for inheritance tax purposes, but it also pays out immediately. |
| 1:00.1 | You don't have to wait to do probate. So do those things. And the reason why you need to know |
| 1:03.5 | how much you've got is then you know roughly what you're talking about and also whether you're |
| 1:07.8 | going to start to come into problems with inheritance tax. Because if you are |
| 1:11.3 | the kind of person who's estate is going to be big enough to be hit by inheritance tax, then you might |
| 1:15.1 | want to do things slightly differently in terms of how you leave the money to people. The reason why |
| 1:18.7 | that can affect who you're going to leave the money to is everyone has a £325,000 inheritance tax |
| 1:24.1 | free allowance. There's an extra £100,000 that you now get building up to 150, |
| 1:28.4 | eventually each, for passing on your own home. If you are nowhere near the inheritance tax |
| 1:33.1 | threshold, then effectively you can leave your house to your surviving wife or husband, and then |
... |
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