Valuing an estate

[shepherdsangeldelight]

Hoping for some advice please.
Sadly, MIL no longer has capacity to manage her affairs or live by herself and will be going into a nursing home.

DH and BIL (who both have POA) have been starting to clear her house prior to putting it up for sale. She has some jewellery, but none of her other belongings are likely to have much resale value (possibly some of her furniture).

My question is if they are ok to charity shop/bin items that aren't worth selling (in their opinion) or should they be inventorising them and attempting to sell regardless? Are they obliged to come up with a fully accurate view of the value of the estate or do can they disregard some items?

Many thanks for any information.

Unless there is hugely valuable jewellery or antiques,
£500 is the usual value of house contents when doing probate so it’s not worth mithering over. As the house and contents will be long gone (hopefully) when the time comes, it will be a simple estate to administer if there’s any money left.
As she is self funding her care from the house sale, the LA won’t be assessing her finances and nobody will be round to check the contents.

@BorgQueen Do you mean that when you’re doing probate, you can disregard anything worth less than £500? That’s useful to know (I’ve got two lots of probate coming up in the next few years).

Is that per item? Eg a library of 2000 books at average 50p each still is under the limit?

Attorneys are required to act in best interests of donor, so in theory would need to sell anything that is of value as opposed to giving away a valuable item. But I know a lot of people on this board simply hire a house clearance company, so there’s clearly no need to carry this to extremes.

No, I mean that it’s perfectly acceptable for the whole house contents to be valued at £500.

Obviously if it’s a multi million pound house that’s not going to be the case but for a normal family home it’s pretty standard.
Most guides to doing probate advise this.
I would say that anything that would be valued separately on house insurance is something that would be sold as an asset.
In reality though, who is going to come and check? I would imagine that if your MiL had any jewellery, she would want family to have it.
When we cleared my FiL’s house, we gave away stuff like multiple Toby jugs and Doulton figures, they had probably spent thousands of pounds on them but in reality they were worth very little, I did check there was nothing rare and sought after though with the Toby jugs.

Ah well, my hopes of an easy valuation are gone.

My mother had an interesting mix of mainly junk but a few good antiques, so we got the local auction house in to value anything worth selling. Took an hour and they then also took the stuff they wanted. They should be able to look at jewellery too.

Are they Executors and sole beneficiaries , we had to declare anything over £200 in value to the solicitor but in reality my sibling cleared the house, said she gave it to charity or on freecycle but we will never be sure and the jewellery was just given to the beneficiaries.

Thank you @BorgQueen this is so helpful. I can’t move for stuff in DFs house but 90% of it is not worth my time at a car boot sale, let alone £500 added together.