Later life Planning
Audley are perfectly placed to help you and your family plan how to preserve your financial future with the minimum of risk.
Later Life Planning
Planning ahead is very important â start now to maintain the lifestyle you want to enjoy in retirement. Plan how to finance for care and preserve your assets or get help from your family to manage your finances should you become incapacitated. The earlier you start to plan, the more effective it can be.
Planning is generally best started early enough that you are still in your wealth accumulation phase. As you approach later years your ability to accumulate additional wealth usually reduces with retirement from paid employment, limiting your choices. In addition, many of the best strategies require a number of years to establish effectively.
- Providing parents, your partner, siblings, and children with financial support
- Securing a tax-efficient income that will last you the rest of your life
- Reducing investment risk and preserving capital
- Maximising the value of your business for an exit or the benefit of future generations
- Ensuring that if you become incapacitated you have appointed people you trust to look after you and your affairs
- Care planning, ensuring that if and when the time comes you receive the best care possible that honours your personal wishes
- Estate and inheritance tax planning, without compromising your financial security
- Reviewing your wills to ensure they reflect your personal wishes
- Establishing or re-organising trusts to pass on your money to family while retaining control over how it is used â either during your lifetime or after your death
Later Life Planning
Planning ahead is very important â start now to maintain the lifestyle you want to enjoy in retirement. Plan how to finance for care and preserve your assets or get help from your family to manage your finances should you become incapacitated. The earlier you start to plan, the more effective it can be.
Planning is generally best started early enough that you are still in your wealth accumulation phase. As you approach later years your ability to accumulate additional wealth usually reduces with retirement from paid employment, limiting your choices. In addition, many of the best strategies require a number of years to establish effectively.
- Providing parents, your partner, siblings, and children with financial support
- Securing a tax-efficient income that will last you the rest of your life
- Reducing investment risk and preserving capital
- Maximising the value of your business for an exit or the benefit of future generations
- Ensuring that if you become incapacitated you have appointed people you trust to look after you and your affairs
- Care planning, ensuring that if and when the time comes you receive the best care possible that honours your personal wishes
- Estate and inheritance tax planning, without compromising your financial security
- Reviewing your wills to ensure they reflect your personal wishes
- Establishing or re-organising trusts to pass on your money to family while retaining control over how it is used â either during your lifetime or after your death
WILLS, TRUSTS & POWERS OF ATTORNEY
We spend a lifetime making plans for the future and accumulating wealth. We worry about what will happen when we are no longer around to care for and provide for our loved ones. We want to know that our wishes are carried out when we have gone.
âFamily circumstances may not be straightforward. Divorce, second marriages and extended families make the decisions more difficult, and it is important to document your wishes correctly. Planning can be complex and involves thinking about things weâd rather not have to contemplate. However, a little planning now can have huge benefits for you and your family a little further down the road.â
Our Estate Planning Team make complex processes simple. We help you get the right legal documents in place, provide advice on making your affairs as tax efficient as possible and ensure your legacy is dealt with in the way you would want. All of our services are designed to help you to protect and preserve your wealth both now and into the future.
Whatever you decide to do, we help you get things in order so your heirs donât have to worry about the financial details while they are coming to terms with losing you.
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“Later Life financial advice can be very complex and is best left to experts in the field. We have advisers with all of the specialist qualifications and experience needed to provide Later Life financial advice, including the specialist areas of Care Fees Planning, Equity Release and Home Reversion Plans.â
Wills
If you die without a valid will, your money and possessions may not go to the people you would like them to. The law will decide who inherits any property and possessions that you own. This is determined under whatâs known as the rules of intestacy. These rules set out who should inherit according to a fixed set of rules with no concern for your wishes. If you have no relatives at all, then under the intestacy rules everything that you own goes to The Crown.
By creating a Will, you can specify how you want your assets to be distributed, including items with both financial and sentimental value. Beyond that, in your will you can also:
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- Name a guardian for your minor children;
- Name an executor to settle your estate and manage the probate process
- Provide direction regarding how debts, taxes and other cost are to be paid
- Provide instructions for covering family member living expenses during the probate period
- Designate assets to be placed in a trust for family members or other beneficiaries
- Designate someone to manage the financial affairs of an incapacitated beneficiary
Don’t leave decisions to the court, name someone you trust to act for you.
trusts
A trust can be an effective way to pass on your money to your family while retaining control over how it is used â either during your lifetime or after your death. No matter how complex your family situation, trusts can help smooth out financial issues, clarify inheritance intentions and avoid disputes. Protection, flexibility and privacy are areas usually front of mind when people think about this, and Trusts can help you achieve all three.
Trusts have many benefits, including ease of transferring assets to heirs, the ability to exercise control over when your heirs receive assets, and helping to maximize the value of your estate by reducing taxes. Trusts are an important consideration in an overall estate plan.
INHERITANCE TAX (IHT) PLANNING
Many people find it unfair that they are taxed for dying. Make sure as much of your savings as possible end up in the hands of those you love.
A Later Life Financial Adviser would consider:
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- How much money you need to have access to
- Whether spending your money might be the best option
- What the alternatives are, given your priorities
Given the availability of a large number of IHT planning arrangements, expert advice on how to reduce a potential liability to IHT successfully is crucial. Our advice helps guide clients through the entire range of options starting with Wills and gifting, and extending through to the more sophisticated, HMRC approved structures such as gift and loan trusts and discounted gift and income trusts.
LASTING POWERS OF ATTORNEY
A Lasting Power of Attorney is a legal document that allows you to appoint someone (or several people) you trust as an âattorneyâ to make decisions on your behalf should you become incapable of managing your own affairs. This could include such things as bank accounts, overdrafts, credit cards, savings, investments, property, and your own personal welfare.
Control and preserve your assets to benefit the people you choose.
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