My mum is withholding my inheritance from my grandfather because of ideological reasons

[Camde]

None of this is confirmed, but I have strong suspicions.

my grandfather sadly passed away last year. He owned a very successful business, and was very generous with all his grand kids.

since he died, I have heard my mother (his daughter) and uncle having conversations about dealing with the inheritance from him. For context, I know that my uncle received enough to pay off all the mortgage on his new £1.2m house, so I know my mum likely received a similar amount.

My grandfather also told me before he passed a few times that I’d be receiving a good inheritance and shouldn’t waste it.

the issue is, my mother is very ideologically opposed to the idea of she or her kids inheriting money. She is very left wing, and believes that it is immoral for some people to receive inheritances when others don’t receive anything. Therefore, she has refused her portion of the inheritance.

it also means that I have no idea how much I have inherited. She is the executor of the will, and I have not seen it. I only ask as I’m saving up to buy a house, and it would be great to know whether I’m likely to receive any money to help with a deposit.

Every time I’ve asked her about my inheritance, she gets very angry and accuses me of not loving my grandfather and only caring about his money, which isn’t true.

how do I deal with this? I don’t want to fall out with my mum over this, and she is still very much grieving.

Ha! Yes, that was what I was thinking too! Very strange career choice for someone who is completely opposed to the concept of inheritance.

If it is a Discretionary Will trust, the whole point is that the Trustee (presumably your mother) has absolute discretion as to whom and when the proceeds are distributed. The potential beneficiaries (grandchildren) cannot demand a distribution.

It is possible that the trust was set up for tax reasons.

The wording of the trust is important here. The fact that Grandad has said "if one grandchild gets something, all of them get the same" sounds like a "letter of wishes" to me, or a clause in the will, not the trust.

When you get a copy of the will, bring it to a solicitor and get them to clarify the terms for you.

If it's as I suggest above, you are at the mercy (or not) of your mother and are basically snookered if she refuses to distribute anything to you from it. Assuming she is the trustee.

It's in a discretinary trust to avoid inheritance tax, and the stipulation about what one gets, all gets is probably a deed of wish which means it's up to the trustees alone and doesn't have to be complied with if they don't want to. You are in a bad situation and there is nothing you can do but clearly your mother as trustee is not comlying with the spirit of the will and you could possibly contest it. It would cost you a mint though.

@Cosyblankets Of course someone can be with an older person. You don’t conduct the meeting but offer support. That’s not the same as putting pressure on and certainly not change their intentions.

It also seems a strange decision to make someone opposed to the concept of inheritance the executor of a will, and for that person to agree to that.

I think much of this may be already covered but sharing if not….In order to get probate (which your Mum will need to have got to deal with the Estate) your Mum will have had to register your Grandfather’s will with the probate service. This means that you can find a copy of the will via this link (https://www.gov.uk/search-will-probate).

If probate has not yet been granted, the will will not yet be available, and similarly your Mum won’t yet be able to distribute anything to you if you are a beneficiary (an executor can only do this once inheritance tax has been paid and probate granted). Probate normally takes about 3 months to be granted from the moment that the application is submitted. In order to make the application for probate your Mum will have to have had all of your Grandfather’s assets valued, submitted an inheritance tax form to HMRC and paid any inheritance tax due.

If probate has been granted and if you have been left something in the will you could present the will to your Mum and ask that she arrange for it to be distributed to you. If she does not do so within a reasonable time you should see a solicitor about your options.

However that said how soon your Mum can arrange for monies to be paid out to you will all depend upon what has been left to you. It could be that you have been left a percentage of your grandfather’s estate rather than a particular amount of available cash or a particular object, and your Mum may be having to liquidate everything (sell property or shares etc) before there is the cash to pay out to your Grandfather’s beneficiaries. In short it may not be as simple as paying out money to the beneficiaries. There is likely to be a lot of admin first which will likely take some time.

It might be that your Mum needs some help with administering your Grandfather’s estate - there is a lot of work even before an application for probate can be made eg notifying authorities, banks, sorting out your Grandfather’s possessions etc. A solicitor will be able to help with that and take away a lot of the administrative work for a relatively modest fee.

Good luck.

I'm sorry OP. Your mum is an ideologue and I have a personal dislike of bigots be they left or right. I'd be really angry in your shoes. She's your mum and should look out for your interests first and foremost. By all means, she should make her position clear regarding social justice and the ethics of inheritance but not withhold anything from you. That's incredibly controlling and unfair to you. How about your moral position on the issue, does it not matter?

Maintaining some left wing moral high ground whilst being a corporate lawyer is laughable. And I say that as a corporate lawyer who is pretty left leaning.

My understanding of a discretionary trust is like this (from the Co-op will making advice!) It's written as advice for the person writing their will.

It appears that if you're a beneficiary you will inherit but when and how much is down to the trustees.

So it's all about WHEN you will inherit not IF.

How do discretionary trusts work?
There are lots of different types of trusts that you can create when
and a discretionary trust is just one example.

What happens with a discretionary trust in your will is that you leave your estate, or part of it, to a trust. You decide who the potential beneficiaries of this trust will be, which can include people who are not born yet.

This can be a good solution if you want to leave assets to your grandchildren, but you expect more grandchildren could be born in the future. The people you have appointed to manage the trust (known as the trustees) can use their discretion to decide which, of the potential beneficiaries you’ve named, actually become beneficiaries. The trustees have complete discretion, which is why they are called discretionary trusts.

A discretionary trust is extremely useful if you are not exactly sure how you want to distribute your estate or if it could be influenced by circumstances you can't be sure of when making your will. By making a discretionary trust, you pass the decision of how and when the trust will be distributed over to the trustees, who make the decision for you. When setting up the trust in your will, you will specify which assets from your estate should be included in the trust and the names of potential beneficiaries. You then give power to your trustees to decide how and when the trust is going to be distributed and to whom.

This could sound strange on the face of it, but there are many reasons why this can be a good idea. For example, if one of your children struggles to manage their own finances, this could make you reluctant to leave them a significant amount of money. A discretionary trust allows you to effectively ‘defer’ their rights to the assets until the trustees feel that it's appropriate.

My suggestion is that your next step should be to make sure that you have complete understanding of the terms of the discretionary trust. Is there a process by which grandchildren request money? Is there a process by which trustees decide Is there a date/age on which the remainder is handed out if it hasn't been used? What happens if a trustee passes away? What happens if the trustees disagree? etc. You may need an appointment with the solicitor who drew up the will to do this, but this will be confidential

This is the best advice on this thread.

Long as she pays IHT or whatever it's called now, surely it would not be immoral to take it? Nothing to stop her / you from making a donation to charity as well if you are so minded. Warren Buffet said he'd leave his progeny enough to do anything they wanted but he is giving most of his wealth away. However , when you have £200bn you have that luxury.

Absolutely this. It's also rather rich (excuse the pun) for a corporate lawyer to be sitting on a high horse about what others should or should not be entitled to. I'm hoping she got no financial support from your very successful grandfather (her father I assume), otherwise the way she is treating you is the height of hypocrisy. However, I would not be at all surprised to find out that she'd been put through private schools, set up with a first home, etc... please tell me I'm wrong...

lol. Left wing corporate lawyer. I might have believed it up until that part.

It it possible the reason your uncle was ae to pay off his mortgage is because he received all the money ?

As for what your entitled to - you would need to have been named in the will

OP I think you need to stop stepping on eggshells and ask for a proper discussion with your DM. She should not impose her ideologies on you. It is her choice to refuse the money, but you should also be given the choice of what you do with yours. Say that you are trying to get on the housing ladder and that Grandad said he was leaving you money and he wanted you to use it wisely. You believe having a permanent roof over your head is sensible and you would like access to your inheritance for this purpose. She can go on and on about what she sees as rights and wrongs, but I can’t believe she wouldn’t want to make her child’s life easier. She’d rather see you struggle, than have what is rightfully yours. You are going to have to step up OP and don’t let her brow beat you. Tell her this is purely the practicalities and nothing to do with emotions or how much love you had for your Grandad. She may be executor, but it isn’t her money. You are named as a beneficiary and she needs to do what is necessary to facilitate that.

OP is a "potential beneficiary" under the trust, not an absolute beneficiary. The trustee (mother) has absolute discretion to distribute some, all, or none to the beneficiaries of the trust, of whom OP is one.

Snookered I'd say.

@Camde contact the solicitor. I’m sorry but ideology shmidiology. To me a fall out would be worth risking at this point. I have been side way disinherited not once but twice in my life and understand how difficult it is to broach the subject, and how it can be misconstrued however, it also revealed to me how disgusting can be when it comes to money and not broaching the subject gets you absolutely no where and no thanks.

No.

Grandad died last year but probate was 2023 - nope, not possible.

If any of this was true once the grandchildren were of age there would be legal avenues open to them.

Just reading through this, I am not a solicitor but have recently organised probate for a will and have also been a trustee on a trust related to a will. Trustees have a legal duty of care to the beneficiaries …. You should contact a trust lawyer. What happens to the other beneficiaries share? Singling out and treating beneficiaries differently is not the settlors wishes. If your mother is acting corporate lawyer surely she would not want it known that she is being chased for not following the wishes of a settlor of a trust and therefore not acting within the definition of a trustee? With due diligence, duty of care and best interests of the beneficiaries. I had a slightly similar situation with a life insurance pay out and a list of beneficiaries - it didn’t have to be declared because it fell outside of probate for tax purposes, the trustees ignored the wishes and paid out to those they chose. The solicitor for probate had seen it and was so concerned she referred it to a partner and they just told the trustees that if found out they could be liable to make good and pay those they missed! Had it formed part of probate I think the solicitors would have insisted the letter of wishes be followed. As the solicitors had the probate account they could have refused to pay out in any way other than stated. Any changes to a will would be via a deed of variation but can only happen with all beneficiaries being involved.

The probate I worked on related to a will from am elderly relative who had very little money but because one son let her live rent free for years in his property she had some savings. When she updated her Will she had no savings but did have an insurance plan for her funeral, she made a stepchild an executor because they worked in bank, had never lived with them …. The will split all her assets between 4, her 3 children and this one stepchild. About £5000 each due. I thought the stepchild would have taken £1000 and said to the others, she’s your mother. But no she keeps saying how kind. I have to bite my tongue - I want to say but when she wrote the Will she had nothing, this is the money saved because your father and step mother lived rent free thanks to a son who is getting the same as you🙁. But I can’t and won’t.

OP, I don’t know your exact financial situation, but if you desperately need some help
towards your house deposit, I do think you need to talk to your Mum about this.
If she is blocking some life-changing financial help, that your Grandfather wanted for you, this absolutely is worth falling out over!

I would start by going for dinner or lunch with her and explaining in detail how this money could really help you, and that you’re extremely upset that she wouldn’t want to carry out his wishes…
It is all well and good having ideology but this is to the detriment of her relationship with you! Does SHE want to ruin that relationship? She needs to hear your side.

I think this is what s happened.

Hi OP. If your mum is trustee of a discretionary trust although it is true she has a discretion to make any distribution, as a trustee she has to act in the best interests of all beneficiaries, not according to her own ideology. You need to find out if there is a there is a separate trust deed or if the trust is solely constituted by the will. This will determine the circumstances in which funds should be paid out. I believe there is a significant tax benefit to a payout within 2 years of the death, so you mum should be bearing this in mind when exercising her discretion in the best interests of the beneficiaries. I would put your request for any further details of the trust and payment from it (perhaps giving a reason as to what the payment is needed for) to your mum and uncle in writing (perhaps by email) and ask for their responses by email. If she continues to indicate she will not exercise her discretion in the best interest of beneficiaries then you may need to consider legal action to change the trustees.

Op I really think you should take a copy of the will to a probate solicitor. Pay for an hour's meeting for them to review it and explain what is going on and what your options are.