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.