Inheritance - dividing up physical property

[MyDadIsTheGreatest]

My father is about to die. He has a will, leaving everything to my brother & me, in a nearly 50:50 split. No other beneficiaries, we are both executors and we are both happy with the terms of the will. No other family involved and no-one who might contest the will.

We will need to get probate for his estate, then sell his house & organise his investments. What I'm wanting to know is what is the protocol for small physical items such as household objects in the meantime. Do we need to leave them all in situ until we've got probate? Or is it generally accepted that we can grab those items we each want as long as the other agrees and we keep a record for IHT/estate valuation purposes? Should we start clearing the house once he dies, or wait till we get probate? What about the small amount of cash he has?

We plan eventually to get a house clearing service in, but there will be some items of household property which each of us is likely to want. We are likely to get a family member who is a solicitor to help us with the paperwork after my dad dies.

How do you account for household property in the valuation of the estate? My dad has all the normal stuff you'd get in a house, but not anything of any particular value. Is there a standard way of assessing the value of the contents of the house?

Sorry to hear about your dad :(

You can get a valuation, they don't value individual items unless they are worth something. So they will put a valuation figure on the total and if there is anything of value they will put that separately.

You can call a local auction house if there is anything you might sell through them and they may do one, or get a professional valuer if there is anything worth over £1500

How to Value House Contents for Probate (Without Getting it Wrong) - Property Rescue

This is a good guide

The rules MAY have changed but both when we cleared my Mum's and my husband's grandmother's, we couldn't wait for probate to be granted for the residences to be cleared as both were rentals. Neither estate was huge, way below IHT in both cases. We were allowed to dispose of anything with no or really low value plus stuff like the contents of the fridge/freezer and foodstuffs and houseplants and other similar things We did keep a record of where the (very few) valuable items went but were absolutely allowed to remove them from the house and were put into the care, for safekeeping, of the people they were intended for. In my grandmother's case, the estate was owed state pension as she still had a pension book and hadn't collected it for some time. I kind of remember that the rule of thumb was if you could sell it for more than a few quid you valued it, if you had to pay someone to take it away then you didn't have to value it but as I said, its a few years ago.

Sorry your lovely Dad has not long.

Unless there are items of considerable value, artworks, silverware etc you can ignore ordinary household goods.

As he is leaving his house to you his IHT threshold is £500k. If he was married to your Mum and she didn’t use up any of her IHT-free allowance, he inherits her allowance taking his IHT threshold to £1m.

Unless his estate (house value / savings accounts) is likely to approach this level I certainly wouldn’t be paying anyone to value his possessions.

Ad you are planning to sell you can get estate agents round to give an idea of market value

It’s fine to tidy and remove personal possessions etc. But you won’t be able to distribute his savings until probate, I think.

It isn’t very complicated completing the probate paperwork, my siblings and I did it ourselves, but it’s good you have a family member who can help if you get stuck.

Thanks, that's really helpful.

We will have to pay inheritance tax as he has lots of savings & investments, but there isn't really anything of any value in the house in terms of stuff. That's useful to know about the IHT allowance - he was married to my mum and she wouldn't have used all her allowance.

If everything went to you dad she won't have used up any of her allowance so you could have £1m as a pp said. Wishing you all the best

I would start clearing the house before probate is granted. It can be emotional and you want the property to be clear of paperwork and personal items before you market it.

A list of items you each want is sensible. If you both want an item put them aside then take turns to pick.

I have done this recently . We have removed anything valuable from the house , we each decided if there was anything for us to keep .

we then had a charity come and clear the house for us , this was done while we obtained probate . Make sure you ring the insurance company and that tell that’s it’s unoccupied. We still had to pay electricity and gas bills . Tell the council it’s unoccupied for council tax reasons .
we had the valuable items valued and we then put that down on the inheritance tax forms.

good luck with probate , it takes while to get through the process and make sure when sending the forms everything is done by special delivery . They lost our forms and we had to re submit

By ‘clear the house’ yes, of clothing, clutter, valuables , but in general houses look better in EA photos with furniture.

I have 4 sisters. When Mum died we sorted into 2 piles. 1 pile of more valuable items and 1 pile of high sentimental value. By far the hardest was the sentimental pile.

We cleared my FIL house. So much stuff. We had it valued for iht and probate. Fortunately plenty of investments to pay the IHT. We then decluttered getting rid of junk and stuff to auction it's taken 5 days of clearance and one day 1.3 tonnes of junk were removed including an old railway line(don't ask!!!). Now just have the furniture left as on the market and we can do a quick clearance once it is sold. The auction money went to the estate less costs.