Life In Possession Trust
A Life in Possession Trust can be included in your will, without the Trust assets leaving your Estate.
How We Can Help
At Fiona Frankland Legal Services, we advise all of our clients to consider protecting your home from future care fees in a legal and legitimate way.
When you have worked hard and saved with the intention of passing it on to future generations, you need to do everything you can to try and protect it. This is why we offer Life in Possession Trusts. Through a Life in Possession Trust you can include this in your will without the Trust assets leaving your Estate.
Why Have A Life in Possession Trust?
The main reason for using a Life in Possession Trust, is to ensure your half share of the property will ultimately go to your specific beneficiaries, regardless of what the life tenant does in the meantime.
So, if the surviving spouse goes on to remarry and makes a Will leaving everything to their new spouse, then the deceased spouses’ assets would still pass to their children if they made a Life in Possession Trust.
- Many couples own their home as joint tenants and the survivor of the couple owns the entire house on the death of the first person. If the survivor needs nursing care, then the whole property would be at risk of being spent on care home fees.
- If the couple owns the property as tenants in common, then only the proportion owned by the survivor is at risk. The half share from the deceased would not be included in any future means test for care fees.
Life in Possession
A Life in Possession Trust is an arrangement recognised by English Law, which allows you to place your beneficial interest in a property (your half share) into a Trust to your specified beneficiaries. This allows the spouse a given right to use an asset (usually a house) for the rest of their life.
The Life in Possession Trust means the half share of the property will pass to the Trustees, on the first death who will hold it on Trust. Your Trustees in the event of the first death will be the legal owners of half of the property, but not for their own benefit.
The Asset or investment involves leaving it to at least two people (known as ‘Trustees’). The appointment of Trustees can be anyone over the age of Eighteen, who have not been declared bankrupt and who can understand the complexities of a Trust. We can include a provision in the Trust for the living spouse to be able to live in the property if they wish, or to sell and move to a smaller property. They can do this by borrowing the half share from the Trustees and pay this back on their death. By doing this you are not land locked.
We will do a Land Registry search to check the status of the property and then if the house is held as joint tenants, we will draw up the documents needed to Sever the Tenancy and submit this to the Land Registry on your behalf. The Life in Possession Trust will be incorporated into your will.
Please call our office on 0115 939 3360 to book an appointment to make a will incorporating a life in Possession Trust.