Estate administration / probate - did you do it yourself?

[turkeyhamster]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking to speak with people who’ve recently been through the estate administration or probate process in the UK, whether you managed it yourself or used a solicitor.

I’m in the early stages of starting a company aimed at making this process smoother and more manageable for families, and I’d love to hear about your experiences—whether good or bad. Your insights would be incredibly helpful in shaping the product.

It would be really great to chat with you. If you’d be willing to spare 15 minutes to share your thoughts, please comment below or send me a direct message. I truly appreciate your time and help!

Thank you so much

I’ve done this with a solicitor and by myself.

If you wanted it to be easier you would be offering to go to the deceased house to go through all the drawers and paperwork. In my experience all of these firms have required you to do all the actual difficult work yourself and then charge £££s for filling in a form.

I used a solicitor and they were terrible! Mistakes at every opportunity, and just got the settlement after 15 months. This was a small estate, and they wanted to charge 9000. They voluntarily cut that to 3000 after I asked for a total file review by a partner. Shocking really, when every step causes such emotional distress.

Thank you both for the response.
It sounds like a common experience where solicitors are charging in the thousands and the overall process takes a long time.

Crafty - great point on finding all the paperwork; was this the case both times?
Why did you use a solicitor one time, but not the other?

Slavetomy - 9000 to 3000!? thats huge; great that you got a partner check to bring this down.
For each step being emotional, can you explain a bit more? is it that you'd prefer to have someone take care of the process whilst you grieve or is it more that the solicitor is making mistakes and making you worry about when and how much will end up with the benefitiaries, or something else?

Every time the word's ' your daughter's estate' is read hits me like a ton of bricks, and my day is made much harder. It's not that a day goes by without remembering, but being hit In the face with emails guarantees a bad day will follow. The actual money was not something I wanted but neither did I want it wasted away by incompetent lawyers. There is something about mingling the love and the losing and then the 'worth' all together that makes it all seem distasteful as well.

Are we REALLY talking UK or do you mean England/Wales? The Scottish process is totally different and is called confirmation. I think you need to be clear about what you're actually proposing.

Good point. Mine was in Scotland.

I found the 'death-min' pretty arduous - those first few weeks getting surviving spouse on all the utility accounts etc. Luckily I could be there in person to go through boxes and drawers looking for statements and bills and finding old investment accounts etc. There's definitely a need for someone to be there in person and hold elderly spouses hands whilst they go through it, particularly when children might live far away. Like a wedding planner.

My relative lived 4 hrs away and so so me not only was it finding and sorting out the paperwork for probate, but getting jewellery, books, furniture valued / sold from a distance . Either I had to travel or trust her friends to access the property take only the right things etc. Even if I’d paid the solicitors to calculate final balances, this was only a small bit of the total workload.

How recent?

For everything other than trusts, I found everything I needed in the public domain, starting with https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/form-pa1p-apply-for-probate-the-deceased-had-a-will

The thing that made it easy or difficult was how good the deceased had been at keeping records. I now encourage everyone to have a will, POA and simple statement of their assets including account numbers and for online accounts, access details and ensuring as much as if practicable is secured outside their estate for IHT purposes.

One set of patents had joint life assurance which had not been written in trust, which made things a lot more complicated, including having to revisit the estimates of its value made on the death of the first partner.

I'd be interested to know more about your business model, how you would monetise the help you offer over existing offerings.

Interesting sounds like a much needed service

Great point.

1. I'm looking at England/Wales initially, but Scotland would be covered later - so hearing experiences with either process would be valuable.
2. I cannot be clear on what exactly I'm proposing yet, as I'm still in the exploratory phase
3. I know it's something people are having trouble with; It takes a long time, it's very costly, not transparent, people are often not satisfied with solicitors support, doing it yourself can be daunting.
4. My mission is to help those bereaved get their assets quickly and with less stress and effort.
5. From initial talks, it looks like a guided service with support of automation could be a solution - but that is not set in stone.

At the moment what is most valuable thing is to understand what people are struggling with - what part of the process is difficult, where it was stressful; then i can create solutions

Thank you all four your responses

Slavetomycat, so sorry to hear that :( It sounds like you would have just liked to have handed it over to someone that you can trust to get things sorted.

Click, snowflake, finallyhere; it sounds like you all had a similar problem - needing to find and sort through all of the assets - which often means being in person to find and sort through load of paperwork and even the sale of assets.

Totally agree with finallyhere; everyone should have a will and keep up to date records (25% of deceased people don't have wills, as of 2023). I have found a few services that offer simple solutions to this e.g., fairwill, octopus legacy, co-op will writing. It seems like competitive space - yet not enough people are using them. It seems to me like this is partially solved, but until people start using these the above problem will continue

Any reasonably intelligent person can sort out a simple estate. If things are more complex I expect a solicitor and possibly an accountant is/are needed. I'm not sure anyone needs a unregulated half-way house.

I found it really easy after following all the info on gov.uk. I also managed to do the land registry forms as well.

Both. But the ‘easiest’ option for me has been using an IFA and a solicitor working as a partnership. Personally, I wouldn’t want someone coming into my house and going through the paperwork etc. having that to do myself has kept me moving forwards and has allowed me privacy.

I did it myself. It was straightforward once we had found all the information on my mother’s myriad bank accounts, ISAs, shares and hidden cash. The IHT helpline were great - we were clearly going to be under the threshold by there was a house involved, and they said we had to request an IHT number. This isn’t mentioned on the gov website.

For me the most time consuming thing was finding all of the information as my mother had simply shoved every piece of paper that had come into the house in a kitchen cupboard - so financial information, pizza menus, hospital letters and parish magazines - years of stuff.

I found it fairly easy - u used the death notification service and online probate forms. It's much quicker if you do it online .

Used the online form, had all bank statements / information etc to hand and it was very easy. Absolutely no way would I pay someone to do what I did.

Did it myself. The work and time was in sorting through paperwork, contacting people, gathering information. Once I'd gone through that and had everything together, filling in the forms was the easy part.

That's why there was no point at all handing it over to a solicitor (or anyone). They'd have charged £££ per hour for the simple bit, after I'd spent weeks doing work far too time-consuming to pay someone else to do.

So what is the useful service on offer then? If you're wiling to charge minimum wage for the hours and hours of sorting and contacting - including being really detail-focused, taking initiative, totally goal-oriented, diligent and reliable, including finding ways to track down information that is not readily available - that would be useful.

But if I have to do all the that, then you say 'how about paying me £150 an hour to do some adding up and fill in a form?'. It's a no.

This.
I've done several estates. Parents, in-laws, brother in law. The latter was the most complicated. It's easy enough to do if you are organised. I would probably use a solicitor if there were trusts involved. In fact DH and I recently updated our wills and we discussed this with our solicitor. She would be happy to just cover the more complex legal bits, register trusts etc.
I wouldn't use a probate service that wasn't a solicitor.

We have just completed it for my mother in law. The hard work was finding the paperwork (she "filed' her paperwork in empty cat food boxes and the will and trust documents were stored with insurance forms in a white paper bin! 😲) and then trying to get pay the probate fee as they only had one phone line open at limited hours. It took a long time but only because the probate office is absolutely hopeless in the last few years.

I've done it twice recently and found it straightforward except for the fact that the second one was executor to the first and I had to take over.

Tbh if I'd paid someone, I wouldn't have used anything less than a fully qualified solicitor. Even the conveyancing solicitor who dealt with the house sale had to double check the law several times.

I did it myself for my dad m (joint executors with my brother who lives in China so signed away his rights / responsibilities). It was fine. My dad was pretty organised and everything was quite straightforward. I never felt like I needed extra help.

I did it together with my mum..,,was fine…..took a bit of time but not difficult….had a quote of 1.5k to do it from solicitor …this was back in 2018….no way would we have payed that..literally set aside 2 full days and did the majority of it then

Depends on the complexity of estate.
Im dealing with a complex estate so I'm using a specialist service for it.
I'm also trying to work full time and they're doing all the legwork on it, which is essential for me in my current situation- I've basically outsourced it.
They're doing a good job for me