Estate and Tax Planning

Protect your clients’ legacy

Solicitor and accountant meeting

Your clients can reduce inheritance tax liabilities and pass on assets as they wish with a sound financial planning strategy.

  • Help maximise what clients pass on
    Your clients’ investment strategies can significantly affect their exposure to inheritance tax (IHT). So when investing on their behalf, we comprehensively review their assets and succession planning objectives for their estates.
  • A bespoke service
    We design specific inheritance tax-efficient plans for your client’s needs, combining an array of investment options such as trusts, life assurance, offshore bonds, Business Property Relief and gifting.

Find out more

Investment options

Trusts
Offshore bonds
Gifting

Trusts

Help your clients to safeguard their assets for their families by working with us to find the type of trust most suited to their needs. The choices are:

  • Bespoke trust – designed purely for your clients and their estates
  • Packaged trust – provided by insurance companies, but selected by us
  • Loan trust and discounted gift trust – allowing your clients to loan or gift some of their assets to trustees who invest them on the trust’s behalf. Any subsequent growth in the value of the assets is exempt from IHT.

Your clients can also use a trust in conjunction with a life insurance policy to create a lump sum for beneficiaries, helping fund any IHT bill incurred by the estate. We can advise on this, too.

Offshore bonds

Another option for your clients is to use offshore bonds alongside a variety of trust arrangements to ensure IHT efficiency while growing their wealth, free from Capital Gains Tax and with income tax deferred.

Your clients can also withdraw 5% of their original bond investment as income. We can advise your clients on both investing in offshore bonds and timing their bond surrenders to make sure they are tax-efficient. 

Gifting

Gifting offers your clients a range of potential tax exemptions. We can advise your clients how they can take best advantage of the following: 

  • Spouse or civil partner exemption – assets left on death to a spouse or civil partner who has their permanent home in the UK – and lifetime gifts of any size to them – are exempt. 
  • Charity exemption – any lifetime gifts, or gifts in a will made to a qualifying charity, are exempt. A donation to charity in a will may also reduce the rate at which IHT is paid.
  • Potentially exempt transfers (PET) – if your client survives for seven years after making a gift to someone, the gift is generally exempt from IHT, irrespective of its value.
  • Annual exemption – gifts of £3000, either as a single gift or as several gifts adding up to that amount, are exempt. Unused allowances can be carried over into the following year.
  • Small gift exemption – gifts of up to £250 to any number of people are IHT-free.
  • Wedding and civil partnership gifts – gifts to someone getting married or registering a civil partnership are IHT-exempt. 
  • Gifts made on a regular basis from surplus income after tax - these must be carefully documented.

Useful downloads

Estate Planning brochure PDF 638.16 KB
Retirement Planning brochure PDF 588.88 KB

How we can help your clients:

Manage their investments
Risks

The value of your clients’ investments and the income derived from them can go down as well as up and your clients may not get back their initial investment. References to taxation are based on our current understanding of the legislation, but we do not represent that it is accurate or complete and it should not be relied upon as such. Tax laws are subject to change.