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 it for my dad and also helped my friend do it for both her parents.

I think if you're reasonably good at forms and stuff it's fine to do. The will writing company that held my dads will gave me the hard sell about paying for some advice. Since they'd not filed accounts with companies house I made it clear I thought they needed advice more than me.

I've done it twice: a simple estate, and then a more complicated one that involved having to complete the IHT forms - not because there was any IHT to pay, but because there was a peculiarity which meant I couldn't use the non-IHT forms. It was fine both times - the IHT forms caused me a tiny bit of head-scratching, but I resolved it soon enough. At the moment I'm watching a family who has insisted on using an expensive solicitor for a relatively simple estate going through the process, and thinking "Why in the name of God didn't you do it yourselves?" Quite apart from the ridiculous amount of money they're going to have to pay out, it's now almost a year on, and still no Grant of Probate. (I'm not terribly impressed by solicitors; you can probably tell).

At the moment I'm watching a family who has insisted on using an expensive solicitor for a relatively simple estate going through the process, and thinking "Why in the name of God didn't you do it yourselves?" Quite apart from the ridiculous amount of money they're going to have to pay out, it's now almost a year on, and still no Grant of Probate. (I'm not terribly impressed by solicitors; you can probably tell).

Same here. The family of a neighbour who died 18 months ago, probate only just granted and the house has sold and fallen through several times because of it. What most people don't realise is that even with a solicitor you still have to do all the donkey work yourself. Then they fill a few forms in. In slow motion.

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.

Scotland's confirmation process needs to be modernised along these lines. Once you hit a certain value of estate (think it's £30k, not sure) you have to fill in the forms and submit them to the court, no online option, you need to separate the estate into Scottish assets and non Scottish assets and write "legalese" in the boxes, can't remember the wording but stuff like "docquetted and attached hereto" and if it's not classed as a small estate, the court won't help at all. So get it wrong and they reject it and you have to start again. So even though I did the hard bit of gathering together all the bak statements and similar, I still had to pay a lawyer/paralegal to fill in the forms.

It's all a bit of a closed shop, the legal profession and courts in Scotland have zero interest in reforming or simplifying the process when they can charge a hefty hourly rate for filling in the forms.

Thanks, everyone, for sharing your experiences! Here’s what I'm hearing:

1. DIY Probate: Many of you found handling probate yourselves manageable for simple estates, with the main challenge being sorting paperwork. Online resources like gov.uk were helpful.
2. Solicitor Frustrations: Several of you were frustrated with solicitors, feeling they charge high fees for minimal work while families still do most of the legwork.
3. Complex Estates: Solicitors seem more necessary for complex estates, especially those with trusts.
4. Self serve / guided services: There’s some skepticism about unregulated probate services, as many felt they don’t add much value for simple cases and you may need a qualified solicitor to help with complex cases
5. Legal Differences: The Scottish "confirmation" process is more complex than probate in England/Wales

Lastly, would anyone be open to having a quick call to share their experience in more detail? Please feel free to DM me if you're interested— I'm happy to offer a 20 pound amazon voucher to anyone who's willing to share 30 mins!

Also, I'd love to hear more about the process after the probate was issued:

Interaction with Banks and Financial Institutions:

1. Bank Communication: Once probate was granted, how did you find the process of contacting and working with banks to release the funds? Were they helpful, or did you encounter any issues or delays?
2. Accessing Accounts: How straightforward was it to access the deceased's accounts and distribute the funds? Did you face any hurdles in getting the banks to release the money?
3. Multiple Accounts: If the deceased had accounts with multiple banks or financial institutions, how did the experience differ between them? Were some banks easier to deal with than others?

Managing and Distributing the Assets:

1. Dealing with Multiple Beneficiaries: If there were multiple beneficiaries, how did you handle distributing the assets? Was there any confusion or disagreement during the process?
2. Investment Accounts or Shares: If the estate involved investment accounts or shares, how did you manage these? Did you sell them or transfer them to beneficiaries? Was this process well-supported by financial institutions?
3. Managing Large Sums of Money: If you inherited a large sum of money, how did you feel about managing it? Did you receive advice on investing or saving it, or did you prefer to handle it on your own?

Going through this at the moment under Scottish process. There is a company recommended on MSE site who cover Scotland but so far Ive only used their site and email prompts, hoping to complete application this week without using full service, their guidance seems to be excellent.
Archaic ‘legalese’ required on the form is one of the most annoying things, plain English would make it much simpler. A clearer step by step guide on Gov/ScotGov/SCTS sites would also be an improvement. it may be peculiar to Scottish system tbf but much seems to be down to individual courts requirements and interpretation of the rules.

I must be one of the lucky ones. There were a few different banks / building societies and companies to deal with but I kept a list of account and telephone numbers / contact names / dates etc so that I had everything to hand if I needed to contact anybody. I found that I was dealt with quickly and efficiently and all the estate was sorted pretty quickly with several beneficiaries no problem. As I said before, I wouldnt pay anyone to do it as I'm more than capable of filling out forms with information that I had put together. I do understand however that some people can't do it for whatever reason. I also spoke with several people that thought that when someone dies solicitors had to do probate stuff etc and were quite suprised when I said how easy it was for me. However, large complicated accounts / trusts / offshore bank accounts etc are a different ball game !

I did it all myself, including all the tax forms. I didn’t find it too hard- there’s lots of helpful advice on line.

The bank accounts have been quite easy to close.Ive not yet got into the business of selling/ transferring shares to the beneficiaries. I’m expecting that to be more challenging.

I'm slightly bemused by what you're offering exactly. Do you have relevant qualifications and/or experience? What about financial regulation etc?

Disclaimer: I'm a secretary for a solicitor in probate. <hides>

I can see there's probably a market for doing it "another way" so I'm genuinely interested in what you're proposing 🙂

We have done one estate with and one without a solicitor. One was a simple estate with a will and one involved intestacy. To be honest I can't really see the point of a halfway house. You either need legal help or you don't.

Thank you all for your responses.
I'd like to get this thread running again.

Bold question - If you were to get someone to do this for you, why would it have to be a solicitor?

Because they can deal with everything required to finalise the estate - paying debts, dealing with hmrc, posting whatever notices in media, tracing accounts, people, outstanding money, dealing with land registry and finding trusted, specialist services if needed, plus dealing with other solicitors, to name some of the services used in finalising my husbands estate. (Admittedly it was complex.)

Also there is full transparency for any resulting funds, which is much easier to prove when probate has a solicitors name and signature plastered all over it. Financial institutions are very hot on asking you to prove all funds are legitimate and not the result of money laundering and want accompanying paperwork.

Trust. With complex cases I would want reassurance that a reputable solicitor has handled cases a million times before and know what they are doing. Also if anything were to go wrong or be queried at any point down the line then they should be suitably qualified to handle things. Just because someone, let's say Joe Bloggs down the pub, says they know how to handle my financial affairs doesn't necessarily mean they can.

A simple estate is easy to administer as long as you understand the process and the paperwork.
The families and death forum on moneysaving expert is full of people who have made a total hash of things.

My question still stands...

I have recently done this, the solicitors were worse than useless, but named as joint executors in the will. It took more than 2 years to sort out, (absolutely no idea why!) I felt like I did most of the work for them and they charged a fortune!

My experience is in building AI products - with the help of a solicitor to train the AI (and the recent advancements in AI), it can provide as good, if not better guidance than a solicitor (although it wouldn’t be a legal advisor without solicitor review).

The most important thing at the moment, though, is understanding where the pain points are, so I’m building something that really helps people

I’ve heard this quite a few times! What was it that made it take 2 years?
I’m guessing you had to prepare all the documents for the solicitors too? (E.g., finding bank details, investment account, life insurance policies etc?)