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Together with our tax specialists, we can recommend how best to minimise the impact of inheritance tax so that as little as possible becomes payable to the taxman. Our advice takes into account family and business structures to ensure that all available exemptions and allowances are utilised. This may involve the writing of wills and trusts. We therefore work closely with clients' lawyers to provide holistic solutions for passing wealth between generations.
To help mitigate tax, there are several possible courses of action, including efficient wills, gifts, trusts, life assurance and structured investment plans. For most clients a combination of these will be recommended.
Objectives and plans should always be reviewed as clients grow older or their circumstances change. A client aged around fifty, for example, might not be ready to pass wealth to children until feeling comfortable that the money would not be needed for personal needs. In this situation, we might recommend an insurance solution to cover the possibility of early death. The policy may then be cancelled after the clients started to make gifts to any children.
Increasingly, due to rising house prices, clients are retiring asset-rich but income poor. In this case, it may be possible to arrange structured investments, in trust, which mitigate inheritance tax but maintain an income. More clients are now considering the purchase of AIM shares for inheritance tax mitigation. We can establish suitable portfolios to help diversify investment risk and enable clients to remove capital from the estate two years after purchase.
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