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Protects — the value of your estate
Inheritance tax is charged at 40% on what you leave above your allowances — and because those allowances are frozen while house prices rise, families who never thought of themselves as wealthy are drawn in every year. Most of the remedy is unglamorous and entirely legitimate: know your position, use the allowances properly, and make sure your will doesn't waste them.
Every person has a nil-rate band of £325,000: the first slice of your estate taxed at 0%. On top of that, the residence nil-rate band adds up to £175,000 where your home, or your share of it, passes to children or grandchildren — taking one person to as much as £500,000 tax-free.
Both allowances are transferable between spouses and civil partners: whatever proportion the first to die doesn't use passes to the survivor. That's how a married couple can leave up to £1 million before any inheritance tax is due — but note the word can. It happens by design, not by default.
Planning starts with an honest map: the house, savings, investments, business interests, death-in-service and life policies — and whether policies are written in trust, which keeps them outside the taxable estate and pays out quickly. Many people discover they're comfortably inside the allowances and mainly need a will that preserves them. Others find a six-figure liability quietly building. Either way, you can't plan around a line you've never located; that mapping is what the free consultation does.
You can give away what you like during your lifetime. Most larger gifts are potentially exempt transfers: survive seven years and they fall out of your estate entirely; die sooner and they're brought back into account, with taper relief reducing the tax on large gifts after year three. Alongside that sit the reliable small exemptions — the £3,000 annual exemption, small gifts, wedding gifts — and one that's underused because few people know it exists: regular gifts out of surplus income, which can be immediately exempt with no seven-year clock if they're genuinely from income, form a pattern, and leave your standard of living intact. Record-keeping makes or breaks that one, and we'll show you how to do it properly.
One caution: giving away the house you still live in generally does not work — it's a "gift with reservation of benefit" and stays in your estate unless you pay a market rent. Schemes claiming otherwise deserve deep suspicion.
Gifts to charity are free of inheritance tax, and there's a further incentive built into the system: leave 10% or more of your net estate to charity and the tax rate on the rest drops from 40% to 36%. For estates already giving something, the arithmetic can mean the charity gains substantially while your family loses little or nothing. It has to be drafted correctly in the will to qualify — which is exactly the sort of clause we build in.
A surprising amount of inheritance tax planning is simply good will drafting: routing the home so the residence band isn't lost; preserving transferable allowances between spouses; using trusts where an outright gift would waste relief or expose assets; second-death planning, because for couples that's when the bill actually lands. This is where our estate planning and your tax position meet — and where pensions, investments and life cover enter the picture, regulated advice is on hand through our sister firm at the same address, so the plan joins up instead of falling between advisers. Business and agricultural property have their own reliefs and their own recent rule changes — covered on the business estate planning page.
Free consultation, online or at your home. A clear map of your position, and what — if anything — to do about it.
Inheritance tax
Normally no: transfers between spouses and civil partners are exempt, whatever the amount. The bill arrives on the second death, when both estates have combined in the survivor's hands — which is why sensible planning always looks at the second death first, and why the transferable allowances matter so much.
Per person — and so is the £175,000 residence band. Because unused proportions transfer to a surviving spouse, a couple can reach £650,000, or up to £1 million where the home passes to direct descendants. Unmarried couples can't transfer allowances between them, which makes wills and planning even more important for them, not less.
If you keep living in it rent-free, the gift usually fails for inheritance tax — it's treated as still yours. It can also create real risks that have nothing to do with tax: the house becomes exposed to a child's divorce, bankruptcy or death, and you've surrendered your security in your own home. There are honest ways to plan around the home; a casual transfer into the children's names is rarely one of them.
Pension death benefits have their own rules, and those rules have been changing — with unused pension funds being brought within inheritance tax from April 2027 under current plans. This is precisely where estate planning and regulated financial advice need to work together, and having both under one roof is the point of our setup. We'll flag it; the regulated side advises on it.
Using the allowances, exemptions and reliefs Parliament created — gifts, the seven-year rule, charity relief, sensible will drafting — is entirely legitimate and exactly what they exist for. What we won't touch are artificial schemes that promise to make tax vanish; they tend to unravel expensively, years later, when you can no longer fix anything. If something sounds too good to be true in this field, it reliably is.