You Named a Guardian. Who Controls the Money Until They Are Grown Up?

When parents make a Will, naming a guardian usually feels like the whole job done. You have decided who would raise your children if the worst happened. For most parents that choice carries more weight than anything else in the whole document.

And yet a second question sits right behind it, and hardly anyone gets asked it out loud. Who controls the money?

A guardian looks after your children. That is a completely separate role from looking after your children's inheritance. The two do not automatically go together, and the person you would trust to raise your kids is not always the person you would trust to manage a large sum of money for them over many years.

Here is the part that surprises people most. Unless you say otherwise in your Will, your children inherit everything you leave them outright at eighteen. Not at twenty-one. Not when they have finished university or settled into a career. At eighteen, on their birthday, the whole lot becomes theirs to do with as they please.

Think about what a family estate is worth these days. A house worth three hundred and fifty thousand pounds, a bit of life insurance, some savings, a pension death benefit. It is not unusual for two parents to leave behind five or six hundred thousand pounds between them.

Now picture that landing in the lap of an eighteen-year-old. Not spread out, not with any guidance attached, but as a single cash sum the day they become a legal adult.

Some eighteen-year-olds would handle it beautifully. Most of us, honestly, would not have at that age. A large windfall at eighteen tends to get spent on the things eighteen-year-olds want, and the money that was meant to see them through their twenties, help with a deposit, or pay for their education can be gone within a couple of years.

That is not a criticism of young people. It is just what a sudden six-figure sum does to almost anyone with no experience of managing it. The problem is that the law treats eighteen as the finish line, and a plain Will does nothing to move it.

The other half of the gap is what happens in the years before your child reaches eighteen.

If you die while your children are still young, the money does not go to the guardian. The guardian raises the children, but the inheritance is held by the people who administer your estate, usually your executors, until each child comes of age. They release money along the way for things like maintenance and education, but the pot itself sits with them.

That can create an awkward split. One set of hands does the daily raising, the feeding and clothing, the school trips and the uniforms, and another set holds the purse and has to be approached every time. Now imagine those two sets of people do not get on. You have handed a grieving family a source of friction at the very moment it can least cope with one.

A well-drafted Will can smooth this over by giving clear powers to release money for the children's benefit. But the underlying structure, money held by one set of people, children raised by another, with everything handed over outright at eighteen, is still there unless you deliberately change it.

What closes the gap is a trust written into your Will. Parents usually reach for the version people call an eighteen-to-twenty-five trust, but the ages are yours to set, whatever suits your family.

So what does it actually do? Rather than your children taking their share outright at eighteen, that share stays in a trust you set up through your Will. You choose people you rely on to run it, they are called trustees, and you decide the age at which your children finally receive the money outright. Many parents pick twenty-five. Some go for a staged release, a portion at twenty-one and the rest at twenty-five, so a young adult gets a chance to show they can handle money before the whole amount arrives.

Until that age, the trustees look after the money and can release it for things that genuinely help. School and university costs. Driving lessons. A deposit on a first flat. Help through a rough patch. You are not locking the money away, you are putting a sensible adult between your children and a large cash sum until they are old enough to manage it themselves.

The trust only comes into being if you die while it is still needed. If your children are already grown by then, it simply does not apply. Nothing about it changes anything while you are alive, and you can rewrite it any time by updating your Will. This is about controlling when your children inherit, not if.

Take Rachel and Tom. They have two children, aged six and nine. Between the house, some savings, and life cover through Tom's work, their estate would come to roughly four hundred and eighty thousand pounds.

Their first Will named Rachel's sister as guardian, which felt like the important decision. But nobody had explained the money side. Under that Will, if both parents died, each child's share, around two hundred and forty thousand pounds, would have been theirs outright the day they turned eighteen.

When they understood that, they added an eighteen-to-twenty-five trust. Rachel's sister stays as guardian, doing the raising. Two trusted people act as trustees, holding each child's share and releasing money for education and living costs along the way. Each child then receives half of what remains at twenty-one and the balance at twenty-five.

Same guardian. Same love. The only difference is that a large sum of money now arrives when each child is old enough to make good use of it, rather than the moment they leave school.

Because a trust runs for years, the people you choose to manage it matter as much as the guardian does.

Look for someone honest and level-headed, comfortable enough with money to make sensible decisions and sensible enough to ask a professional when they are out of their depth. It helps if they get on with your chosen guardian, because the two will often be in touch about what the children need.

It need not be the same person as the guardian, and there are times you would be wise to keep them apart. Warm, patient, brilliant with kids: that describes a wonderful guardian, and it says nothing about whether the same person can steward a large sum steadily for a decade. Give each job to whoever fits it.

Name more than one trustee and you get two things worth having: someone to hold the other to account, and a fallback if one of them cannot carry on. For most families, two does the job.

The good news is that closing this gap does not require anything exotic. It is a set of provisions written into an ordinary Will, and for most families it costs very little more than a straightforward Will without a trust.

If you already have a Will that names a guardian but says nothing about holding the money past eighteen, that is worth revisiting. The guardian clause is doing its job. The money is the part that is quietly still set to land at eighteen.

Trusts inside Wills throw up questions that are far easier settled in conversation than on paper: what ages to pick, how staged the release should be, who ought to be trustees. We would rather talk those through than leave you guessing. If you want to see how an eighteen-to-twenty-five trust would sit with your own family, our team is on 0800 055 4321.