Jessica recommended a range of solutions to us, to create a robust estate plan that secures our financial future and ensures that our hard-earned money will be passed on in the way we want.

The first step was creating a clear, detailed Will that outlined exactly what we wanted to happen to our wealth in the event of our deaths. We took great comfort in arranging this, as it is a legally binding document where we made instructions for our money that executors must follow by law.

Alongside this, we also set up a Lasting Powers of Attorney for both of us to protect our estate, if one of us lost our mental capacity as we aged and could no longer make cognisant decisions.

Next, as our assets exceeded the Nil Rate Band and the 2 million threshold, we knew that our children would have to pay a substantial inheritance tax.

We considered various options to try to reduce this. One option was a whole life insurance policy to pay the tax bill. But this was not right for our situation. We settled on setting out a gifting action plan in our lifetime and also to bequest some of our money to charity.

Then Jessica helped set up a trust, allowing us to ring-fence the money and appoint trustees to control how and when to distribute our residual estate while ensuring we still had some control of our funds and ensuring it would not affect our day-to-day living in retirement.

The Trust will also protect James and Sarah’s inheritance from events such as divorce, remarriage or bankruptcy. This alleviated our concerns over what might happen if one of them died and the surviving one remarried.