It occurs to me as we approach the Summer that we are in a period of high risk. No, I’m not talking about the stock markets or the economy. I am talking about the risk of losing momentum in the Estate Planning world.
We had the budget in the Autumn which was arguably the most impactful on our Estate Planning in a generation. Major measures were introduced that are pulling more and more people into the IHT space, while making existing IHT liabilities much worse in many cases.
Following announcements of this magnitude, it is natural to see a spike in activity and also a spike in impetus – people are more motivated to get things done to try and improve their position.
Of course, as time goes on, the news gets old, real life starts getting in the way and attention turns to other things, however, unlike things like stock market crashes which we know to be temporary (which of course gain a similarly large amount of media attention), the IHT landscape seems to have shifted in the long term. While the media noise and dinner table conversations may have stopped, the position remains the same as it was in the Autumn and seems unlikely to improve any time soon.
Of course, we now enter the summer holiday season, people get busy, life gets in the way.
However, please don’t let this prevent you from taking action on your estate planning. So many times, we have conversations with people who have the best intentions, but just never quite get around to taking action.
This is so devastating for the families that are impacted. For those people who never even thought about IHT (or those who did and actively, consciously decided not to do anything about it) families can usually reconcile that. However, it is difficult for families to write that huge cheque to HMRC, when they know “Mum and Dad were meaning to sort this out and just never quite got around to it”.
Our message here is simple – the time is now!
We understand life is busy and there are lots of great things to do over the Summer, however there is no time like the present and, like so many things in life, in Estate Planning, the sooner we get started the better!
