I am sure you will be familiar with the saying ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ or KISS in acronym form.
I had an interesting conversation with a client this week on this subject.
We were discussing the implementation of their estate planning framework, including new wills, trusts and some lifetime gifting for their children.
During the conversation, when I asked how they would like to distribute things, they said “oh we are going to keep it really simple – sorry”.
Sorry?
I wondered to myself why they were apologising for keeping things simple. Surely simplicity beats complexity any day of the week (we believe this so strongly in fact, that it is a part of our mission statement as a firm).
However, I do sometimes wonder in today’s world if we do see complexity as attractive. Given the proliferation of information available to us via the internet, we are able to research hundreds or thousands of options sometimes to solve just a single problem. Given our fear of making the wrong decision, we often like to ‘hedge our bets’ and we go for a little bit of 3 options rather than just backing a single solution.
This is all well and good, but it does add complexity into our lives and, when we consider this from an estate planning angle, we are not the ones who suffer at the hands of that complexity – it is our executors – usually our spouses, children or other loved ones who have to pick up the pieces of the mess we have made.
When we consider the probate cases we work on for clients, you might be surprised to learn that there is not actually that much of a correlation between the value of the estate and the complexity.
It is not unusual to see a £500,000 estate which is remarkably complex, with assets spread over numerous accounts, plans and policies (our record thus far is 52!).
On the flip side, sometimes we work on a £3m estate which is beautifully simple, with just a single banking relationship, one investment platform account with everything nicely consolidated and digitised and perhaps a property or two.
In fact of all the probate cases we worked on last year, arguably the smallest estate was the most complex of all.
Back to my client conversation – I reassured them that simplicity is highly desirable in our estate planning and that their children would thank them for making things so straightforward.
The message here is simple – just because we want to protect our assets, reduce our potential IHT bill and look after our beneficiaries doesn’t mean we need (or should desire) an overly complex solution – KISS!
My clients should not have felt sorry for keeping things simple, they should feel proud and give themselves a pat on the back – their beneficiaries and future generations will thank them for it!
