Succession Planning and Inheritance Tax Planning
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 and, therefore, we 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 available, 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. Clients in their fifties, for example, might not be ready to pass wealth to their children until they feel comfortable that the money will not be needed for their own requirements. In this situation, we might recommend an insurance solution to cover the possibility of early death, but cancelling it when the clients start making gifts to their children.
Increasingly, due to house prices, clients are reaching retirement 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 for the clients.
Additionally we are seeing more clients consider the purchase of AIM Shares for inheritence tax mitigation. We can establish for our clients a portfolio of AIM Shares to help diversify investment risk and remove the capital from the estate two years after purchase.
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