You are right, it is very seldom complicated. A £40k estimate is outrageous, even if the estate was valued at £4m it would have to be split between hundreds of assets to even approach that figure. There are quite detailed rules dealing with charging rates for contentious on non- contentious probate. Even if a solicitor quoted an outrageous figure and that figure was accepted then , if challenged he would be in breach of his professional rules and would be very lucky to escape a striking off order. If the estate was valued at £4m and consisted of say a house, if he charged 1% I would say quite confidently that he was grossly overcharging.
I might think about giving to charities if They show a reel of advertising for charity’s In the interval at the theater at fantom of the opera or swan lake. And not in the middle of the afternoon To little old ladies like my mum who have cataracts trying to watch The fourth repeat of murder she wrote on TV, Give just £2 … to the donkeys who had to carry all those bricks.. Give just £2 … to the emaciated animals RSPCA.. Give just £2 … for clean drinking water in Africa.. Give just £2 .. to blind children in India.. Give just £2 …to homeless people Give just £2.. to the dolphins Give just £2 .. whatever they can think that will empty a pensioner’s purse, apparently they have a sucker’s list of gullible people that they share so they put pressure on to give more once they give anything .
It's under £1M, a house, half a dozen investment accounts, that's it. No contention, all very orderly and will.
From memory it is 0.5% on value of house and .75 to 1% on remainder plus possible time expended thereafter ( but generally not) . So clearly an outrageous quote.
I get annoyed at very small charities because there, the overheads of having just one or two people also soak up the donations, and the temptation for somebody to just pocket the rest becomes a bigger hit too. Somewhere in the middle ground between a one man band and a Non Governmental Organisation there must be a happy optimum.
My Mother in Law raises money for Spina Bifida. She collects toys etc, does summer shows doing teddy tombolas etc. She has raised 8k this year. No overheads just that direct to local charity. 2 of my sister in laws have it. Great achievement for 1 peron doing it part time.
...who have overheads? Fund raising is all good as long as her hard work and dedication doesn't go on a BMW for the charity directors to use. Then there's charitable trusts like the canal and river trust that run our waterways. It's some kind of tax loophole. They like to give the impression they're a charity but they are not. They do sort of try and attract donations, some of you may have been approached by their professional chuggers on the tow path. The reality is this charade nets them of loss of several £m per year.
My father's estate was very similar. I paid £4200 including VAT, largely to avoid dealing with a nephew and niece who I knew would be awkward and unpleasant, and they were. Without that it would have been fairly easy to do myself.
That's more like it. Makes you wonder if they got the decimal point in the wrong place! Wills and relatives eh? When my mother's only cousin died she was the only relative he's spoken to for 40 years, they were very close as both were only children so they were more like siblings. When he died some totally unknown relatives got wind of it, somehow BS'ed there way into his posh London flat, emptied it and... his will disappeared. Nobody knew which solicitor he used and London is a big place. He'd told her previously that he'd left everything to her and he was pretty well off - he got to 70 and had never worked - trust funds and investments what what! So it all got shared out by some equation. Interesting chap, at his funeral there were a couple of hundred people who sort of represented his pastimes and were all completely ignorant of each other. One thing he did was coach the England hockey team.
There's such a mixed bag of charities. In my experience the Charity Commission is so under-resourced that they can't deal with all the, relatively, minor cases and the rogues know that. I've been involved with several charities and have approached the CC about 2 of them and had no success in getting them to investigate. I'm currently chair of a small national charity and we've no premises, although we used to have; no employees - we outsource what we need, when we need it; no commission fees; and no paid directors or trustees, everyone gives their time pro bono . As a result we survived the Covid years on little income - we run events to generate funds - but still managed to spend the same on our charitable activities.
I could have been a "Wax Chandler", my elder bro is their financial bod. They have investments and a Gresham Street property they've owned since 1501. https://www.waxchandlers.org.uk/ These days they actually operate as a charity and any money they make support London homeless and the like. I saw the accounts once, everyone works for free and they'd spent £48 on "salaries". The Prices, being pretty much the only people still making candles in any meaningful way are the big wigs. If I'd known more about them I'd have joined but I was a punk squatter drug fiend when I was asked and it didn't seem appropriate to my life style! They're pretty cool and very supportive of their members. My grandfather wrote their history. We were big in the Beeswax trade at some point and owned a big chemical works on the Isle of Dogs. Dunno what happened but I expect someone *******ed it all up the wall at some point. One of my relatives taught queen Victoria to play piano and sing, she was a bit sh1t by all accounts but would do stuff like pinch his pencil and replace it with a silver one the next time. Fink neither of them wanted to be there and got on because of that. She was a little girl at the time. lol
