Is there an easy way to do this? (Will related)

[dontbesillyplease]

Wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction please?

My dad is 75 and not in great health and has recently written a Will.

He has no property to leave but does have 3 small life insurance policies that he wants to leave to me and my siblings. The total life insurance is about £20k and he'd like us to use the money for his funeral costs and then divide whatever is left between us.

He has no property or assets so he recently used a free Will writing service and in it, appointed me as executor and said the money from the policies should be distributed according to the above wishes. Will-writing service came back and said you can't leave life insurance policies to someone in your Will, instead you need to put the right people down as beneficiaries (via the insurance companies) or put them into trust. It's such a small amount of money but there is a complicated family situation involving a grabby relative who would have zero chance in court but would still create a world of pain in trying to get a thousand or two...so my dad wants to avoid money going into an estate and instead just go direct to us.

Dad has been on to the two companies who the policies are with and they don't allow beneficiaries to be named or for the policies to be put into trust.

Is there a simple online system (here's hoping!) where we can put the policies into trust ourselves or do we need to consult a solicitor? He has very little money so we're just trying to figure out the best way to do it without spending a lot of cash.

I am a bit confused about the response from the insurance companies. Does your Dad still have the policy details? Because if they pay out on death then they absolutely should have a beneficiary named or be paid out in accordance with the will. Is he sure that these policies will pay out on death ?
Anyway simplest is that he just leaves all his estate to be split between the two of you and then whatever is in it is split which includes any assets in his name. But as I said, I thought insurance of this type is paid to beneficiaries as it literally can't be paid to him as he will have passed away. So I'm a bit worried that this policy doesn't do what he thinks it does

Thanks for this! Yes, they're whole life policies from two different companies and were set up with the express intent of leaving at least a little bit of inheritance to us kids as he (and my late mum) never bought a home.

He's actually rung me (after I told him I'd posted on here) and one of the policies is with British Seniors who have since confirmed there is a beneficiary (me) but the other two policies are with Sun Life who say that a) he can't name a beneficiary and b) they do not have a service where the policies can be put into trust. If he wanted to do that he'd need to seek legal advice.

It all seems a bit over the top for such small amounts of money! My dad has paid into them for years and is reluctant to let them go because it would mean that my siblings and I would need to fund funeral costs. But at the same time is it worth paying into them if they'll just go into his estate and there will be inevitable grief from daft relative!

It sounds like the Sun Life policies will pay out to his estate. If that is the case, his will shouldn't talk about leaving life insurances to specific people. As the will writing service said, you can't do that. Instead, his will should simply explain how his estate (which, if I am right, will include any money from Sun Life) should be distributed.

with such a small amount of money it will just be paid to next of kin on production of death certificate. My aunt passed away and left 10k in a bank account and it was just paid out immediately to my mother her remaining sibling

You don't need to place anything into trust. Just make sure the will is correctly drafted and clear that the estate is to be split between yourself and your sibs and this other relative has nothing to do with it. I think you are worrying unnecessarily as there's no way anyone can contest a will if they are not dependent on your dad and he's left it to his surviving descendents. The will sounds simple and fairly clear.
However the only point to note that the policy that pays out to you will not form part of his estate and therefore you will potentially get more if the rest (the estate) is split equally

Sunlife pay to the estate. When my relative died her policy was paid into the bank account that the premiums were paid from.