Families can often be unsure who to appoint, particularly as Executors of their Wills, but also sometimes as Attorneys under their LPAs or Trustees under their Trust documents.
Where solicitors are involved in drawing up these documents they will usually offer to be appointed as part of their service. This can be very expensive, as they will charge an hourly rate for any work that they do as Executor, Attorney or Trustee, so it is very important to check what that hourly rate is. In many cases it could do well over £200 an hour, plus VAT.
If a solicitor acts as an Executor they can also charge you a percentage of your estate to provide you with Probate Services, which can cost even more.
In addition, a solicitor will often have very little engagement with you once your Will, LPA or Trust document is drawn up, which means that they will not know and understand your circumstances and will have to spend time re-reading documents, for which you will of course be charged.
That’s why, purely in response to requests from many clients, we also offer an Executor, Attorney and Trustee Service.
We will agree with you in advance the hourly rate we will charge for these services, or we may agree to undertake these services on a Fixed Fee basis. Whichever way we agree to work it will almost certainly be at a much lower cost than a solicitor would charge for providing the same service.
The other advantage of using our services is that having provided you with regular advice as your IFA, we will already have an intimate knowledge of your financial circumstances and have built a relationship with you over time which means we will probably have to spend much less time than a solicitor would to provide you with the necessary services.
In many cases, because of our long standing client relationships we are often able to provide continuity of advice to family members.
If you would like to know more about our Executor Services, please contact us for an initial discussion. You are under no obligation and all initial discussions and initial meetings are FREE of charge.
