Docklands Solicitor

- If the answer is ‘NO!’ then you need to consider how you own your assets, and the available estate planning options to help you preserve them for your children, or your side of the family.

- If you own your property with your spouse as ‘Beneficial Joint Tenants’, effectively you both own 100% of the property, which means that on 1st death the surviving joint tenant will inherit by ‘survivorship’ and the property cannot be passed to anybody else, no matter what your Will says.

- So if the survivor then remarries, and again owns the property as joint tenant with their new spouse, if the survivor predeceases them, the new spouse will take the whole property, and your own children would receive no part of it after the death of both their parents.

- How can you avoid this situation? The first step is to sever the ‘Joint Tenancy’ to ‘Tenants in Common’ so that you both own 50% of the property, and can then each leave your 50% via your Will. The next step is to include a Trust in each Will, to appoint your children as ultimate beneficiaries, but providing a ‘life tenancy’ or ‘right to reside’ (eg until they remarry) for the surviving spouse, so they can continue to live in the property, but cannot pass your share onto your replacement!

- There are many areas of flexibility that can be built into such Trusts, and professional advice should always be sought from a Solicitor or Will writer specialising in Estate Planning.

Labels: beneficiaries, estate, joint tenancy, Survivor, tenants in common