My father died in October 2020 and probate is being sorted by solicitors. Everything was going smoothly but they’ve hit a bump.
My mother died in January 2009. My sister called me this evening to say that in my mother’s will she’d left each of her surviving children a substantial lump sum. Now none of us can remember her bequest being mentioned ( I think I’d remember something like that but it was an upsetting time) but my father asked us to sign a deed of variation so that he kept this money, presumably knowing it would come to his children eventually.
The hiccup is that the solicitors have seen my mothers will but cannot find the Deed of Variation. This creates IHT problems as unless there is physical proof of the DoV then the taxman will take more from my fathers estate before it gets divided between us siblings.
I will be looking through all the paperwork tomorrow to see if we can find it, but we’ve already been through it a few times for various reasons and I’d have thought I’d notice a DoV. Should we not be able to find it what can we do?
The solicitors originally holding my father’s will were taken over by another company in 2010, and then again that company was taken over by a third solicitors in 2014. The 2014 solicitors said they didn’t have a copy of my fathers will, so will be unlikely to hold the DoV. our solicitors dealing with probate got the will from the National Will Register.