Inheritance out of the blue

[UmbrellaEllaEllaAyAy]

Unexpectedly, we have been contacted by a company informing us of a family member that passed without a next in kin and there is an estate to be passed down. I have no experience at all and no idea where to start, if we chose to go with the company they will take a fee once the estate is released. What happens if we do not go with said company, how do we access the estate? I understand once the estate is settled, funds will be held in trust for anyone in the line to inherit.

Since we have no experience of probate and inheritance ….

AIBU to pay the fees and let company handle it all

or

YANBU to do the leg work yourself, unnecessary to pay the fees as the funds will eventually end up where they should be anyway?

Any advice would be much appreciated if you have been in this position

An old neighbour of ours once left me and my siblings some money in her will, which we found out about from her disgruntled son. He was very unhappy.

We received cheques for £25 each.

Mind you, that money would probably be worth about £27.50 now, so you can see why the fella would be upset.

Are you familiar with the genealogical proof standard? Would you know what steps to take to make sure you are researching your family correctly and ensuring you are not mixed up with another family of a similar name? And which documents to provide to the government to back your claim?

Yes heir hunting companies take a fee but the benefit of using them is that they know what they are doing, and will process the claim quickly and with no hassle to you.

Because if someone dies without having made a will, their estate is divided among their relatives. There is a pecking order - children first, then siblings etc. But if you have a single man/woman, never married, no children, only child and their parents are also dead, the next in line are cousins. Many many people don't know their cousins.

You may not have a choice about the company's fees. I was contacted by one of these companies, because they had been engaged by the executors to trace all the possible beneficiaries, so the executors had already accepted that the fees would come out of the estate.

If you're in contact with cousins or 2nd cousins ask around the family and see if anyone else has had the same letter, that might help you narrow down which side of the family it is.

To answer your actual question, I would sign up with the heir hunter as doing it yourself could be difficult and a lengthy process. Anything you receive is a bonus as you weren't expecting it but don't expect much if you have a lot of cousins and 2nd cousins.

I think this would be my reaction. But I'm happy to be corrected by someone who's had a different experience!

We had exactly the same situation a few years ago. We thanked them and pursued it ourselves. They told us the estate was only worth about 12k but ended up being closer to 100k so I wouldn’t trust them to do the job properly even if you do go with them. I remember we had to prove the connection to the deceased (by applying for various birth/marriage certificates etc) and then we had to apply for probate (as this particular person died intestate hence the heir hunters involvement). Good luck, if you have the time it’s definitely worth pursuing it yourself and cutting out the middle man

PS they also appear to take a huge cut and for not doing very much work / being particularly thorough.

I'd just mention that if you decide to do the leg work yourself, you need to make sure you cover yourself. These 'heir hunter' companies can be incredibly useful - they'll be able to find all relatives, even those you don't know about. They'll be able to provide a full family tree and indemnity insurance in the event a missed relative pops up in the future.

If you take on the role as Administrator and conduct the research yourself, you will be responsible if someone gets missed and might have to cough up their share if you distributed the funds.

I've known of two intestacies where there were around 50 beneficiaries! No one would have anticipated it, most didn't know who the deceased was. It can be a hell of a lot of work.

Agreed but surely worth giving it a shot yourself and get the heir hunters involved later if it appears to be overly complicated?

The indemnity insurance is a really good point. I think people are misunderstanding what they would potentially be taking on. It's not just about proving your own link to the deceased using BMD certificates and drawing up a family tree linking you up. It's about constructing a properly referenced family tree for the deceased, obtaining all the certificates and researching all the stems to prove that you have found all of the other beneficiaries too. Proving people didn't marry or never had children as well as proving they did.

If you have substantial experience in family history or genealogy you might be able to take it all on. With no experience, it's a huge undertaking. And yes, if you do miss that great uncle Alfred was married twice and had a child from his first marriage who is a beneficiary, and that beneficiary pops up at a later date, it's you who must pay them the cash.

I also don't think that an initial estimate of £12k which later turns out to be much more is indicative of a scam or that the companies don't know what they're doing. From dealing with my dad's estate I know that the amount my sister and I estimates initially was way out, once we started the process we discovered loads of savings and things we had no idea about.

I disagree. I have a contact who works in the legal profession specializing in estate management and wills and probate and they told me that this is a common tactic of such companies to get you to sign up. They tell you it’s a smallish amount so you think it’s not worth bothering doing it yourself but inevitably it turns out to be much more so their cut is huge. Apparently it happens all the time.

I have a contact who works in the legal profession specializing in estate management and wills and probate

I'm assuming this contact helped you with your claim? That's a very different position to many who will have absolutely no idea where to start with researching the family tree, or the potential legal situation should you miss a beneficiary.

Not much actually. I was living abroad at the time so I had to do most of it online. I asked him a few basic questions at the beginning but the rest I did myself. It’s not that difficult once you get your head around it. I’m just pointing out what my experience has been so that op has a balance of opinions/experiences.

This happened to us and we used the company. It was a very distant relative and, despite the money being split between lots of us, my share was enough to buy a very decent car. I don’t remember how big a cut the company took, but the money was a big blessing and arrived within a few months.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/bona-vacantia

If you know the name, find them on here and follow the process if you want to.

My in-laws were contacted, a family member did the claim for them who was also entitled to inherit and they each received £2,000. A nice surprise.

We are going through this currently and decided to go with the company that contacted us.

There are potentially a lot of distant relatives involved, some deceased and despite having a family tree on that side, there were gaps (including the deceased), therefore taking on the claim ourselves was not going to be straight forward, lengthy, time consuming and potentially risky. Not knowing the size of the estate also played a part, but it is likely to be modest at the most unless the distant relative was a secret saver/investor and a lot of people would be entitled to a share. We decided that the work involved including having to provide and pay for documentation, as well as indemnity just wasn’t worth the risk of doing it ourselves despite having probably better research experience than average.

Yes - it definitely sounded like a DV situation. She was found guilty of manslaughter and spent some time in an institution vs prison. There was a Times article I found where she tried to claim his estate afterwards, unsuccessfully. But I think she did keep the house - which was sold when she moved into a care home about 10 years before she died. It was all fascinating.

My ex FiL got about £8000 this way from his estranged brother. FiL was in a nursing home with dementia so we just let the heir hunter company do all the work and ex MiL shared the money out between the grandchildren.

Yh. These sort of companys tend to actively seek people out over relatively minor sums & charge a fee for 'representing' your interest so unless you know the person who's died & who else has been contacted it would be impossible to undercut them & go it alone

I know this is an old thread but we have been contacted from one of these companies about a cousin of a deceased grandparent who passed in 2017 without a will, the thing is we know the grandparent has 2 siblings that are still alive. So if they claim too will it all go straight to them or would we still be entitled to a percentage? i just don't know if it's worth us claiming when we know there are much closer relatives than us?!

That sounds similar to our case. My (deceased) GMs cousin was the person that died. My GM also had at least one brother still alive. So he got a large proportion as the only surviving cousin, and then descendants of the other cousins got smaller shares. My share was tiny though.

You all need to sign up normally with the company so they have permission to do this. In your case it sounds like the inheritance (which might not be large) would be split between the 3 cousins. The 2 still alive would get a third each and your deceased GP's share would be divided between their children (or grandchildren if parents had also died)

That of course depends on whether there are other cousins