We have unfortunately been dealing with a number of probate cases recently and it strikes me just how different the families’ experience can be, depending\u00a0on how organised the deceased had been with their financial affairs and paperwork prior to their passing.<\/p>\n
In some cases, people have been very conscious of the ‘mess’ that will be left behind when they pass and have made a concerted effort to simplify and consolidate their affairs. The ideal scenario here is that all of the cash banking is with a single organisation (or, if multiple savings accounts are required, then these are handled through a cash aggregation platform) and all of the investments are held on a single platform – simple!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In other cases, unfortunately, this process has not happened and there really can be a bit of a task for the family to undertake to first track down all of the various policies and plans that are scattered around and then as a second task, to determine if these plans still exist or are still in force.<\/p>\n
It is often tempting to keep old paperwork ‘just in case’ it is needed, but in actual fact, this could be doing your family a disservice. The issue\u00a0with finding an old bank statement from the 1970s in the house is that it begs the question… is this account still open?<\/p>\n
As a result, this sends the family on a bread crumb trail trying to track down an account that may well have been closed decades ago, or, if not, the organisation who originally held the account may have merged with another business or been acquired\u00a0(sometimes several times over) making it harder and harder to actually get a definitive\u00a0answer about the status of the account.<\/p>\n
This creates more\u00a0complexity<\/strong>\u00a0in the probate process for the family and executors.<\/p>\n Another challenge nowadays is that it is easier than ever to open new accounts and plans online (no longer is it necessary\u00a0to travel into town and sit in a 90 minute appointment\u00a0to open a new savings account – we can do it with the click of a button).<\/p>\n In the famous words of Domino’s Pizza – if you make it easier for people to order Pizza, they order more Pizza!<\/p>\n The same here is becoming true of banking, savings and investment accounts – it is easier to open them, so we often do.<\/p>\n The challenge this creates is simply the\u00a0volume<\/strong>\u00a0of work then required to get a good picture of the estate and get up to date valuations for the probate submission. While online accounts usually make it much easier for the\u00a0account holder<\/strong>\u00a0to access information, the new breed of online businesses often have little to no in-person customer service and so it can actually be harder for the executors to deal with these organisations than the more traditional high-street names.<\/p>\n Ironically, the same technology that has made it easier to open lots of different accounts has actually made it easier to have less of them – we now have savings aggregation platforms and investment platforms that allow us to have a variety of accounts from many providers, all under the one roof – this really is the best of both worlds.<\/p>\n As such, there is usually no reason not to have everything in one place, beautifully\u00a0simple and consolidated. I know I tend to bang on about this like a broken record, but it really does make a huge difference to those that we leave behind. Doing this reduces both the\u00a0volume\u00a0and<\/u>\u00a0the complexity<\/strong>\u00a0of the work that our executors (or the professional help they appoint) have to undertake.<\/p>\n Now… please don’t take any of this as a lecture. We all mean well and want to do the right thing by our family – but we all know that life gets in the way sometimes and ‘getting our affairs in order’ is rarely going to be the favourite thing for us to tackle on our to-do list.<\/p>\n However, we must tackle it if we wish to make things easier for our families. It really is up to you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We have unfortunately been dealing with a number of probate cases recently and it strikes me just how different the families’ experience can be, depending\u00a0on how organised the deceased had been with their financial affairs and paperwork prior to their passing. In some cases, people have been very conscious of the ‘mess’ that will be… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","wp-sticky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3357,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3356\/revisions\/3357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buckinghamgate.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}