Liz Hodgkinson from the Telegraph perfectly describes the difficult process of distributing her partners estate after his sudden death in 2004. In the face of bereavement she found herself, like many executors in a nightmare chicken and egg scenario – her partner’s bank accounts were frozen and she couldn’t access them without grant of probate, to get grant of probate she had to pay inheritance tax but she had no access to the accounts so had to try and raise £165,000 from alternative funds. On top of the issues surrounding inheritance tax she eventually decided, because of the increasingly complex situation, to employ a solicitor to handle probate but the solicitor ended up charging more than double the original estimate and she was still left with the headache of dealing with creditors chasing funds from frozen accounts.
