Estate Planning for Parents

When you become a parent, your risk tolerance changes overnight. The motorcycle gets sold. The contents insurance goes up. You start wearing a seatbelt on short trips to the shops. But the one thing that would actually protect your children if the worst happened, a proper estate plan, is the thing most parents never get round to.

Estate planning sounds like something for rich people with complicated trusts and offshore accounts. In reality, it's about making sure your kids are looked after, your partner isn't left fighting bureaucracy, and your wishes are followed rather than guessed at. You don't need to be wealthy. You just need to be a parent.

If you have children and you don't have a Will, everything that follows is built on sand.

A Will lets you name guardians. Without one, a court decides who raises your children. We cover this in detail in our Guardians for Children guide, but the headline is: you pick the person, or a stranger picks for you. For most parents, that's enough motivation on its own.

Beyond guardians, your Will controls who inherits your estate and in what proportions. You might want everything to go to your surviving partner. Or you might want assets held in trust for the children until they're old enough to manage money sensibly. Without a Will, the intestacy rules dictate what happens, and those rules don't allow for any kind of nuance.

Executors matter too. Their job is to track down every asset, pay off every outstanding bill, and make sure the right people receive what's left. Think of the executor as your family's project manager during the worst period of their lives: someone who keeps the admin moving while everyone else focuses on grieving. Our Choosing Your Executors guide goes deeper on this.

Wills get talked about. LPAs don't, which is odd because the scenario an LPA covers (you're alive but incapacitated) is statistically more likely to happen during your children's childhood than the scenario a Will covers (you're dead).

A Property and Financial Affairs LPA means someone can pay your mortgage, manage your bills, and access your savings if you're unable to do so yourself. Without one, your partner can't touch your individual accounts even if they desperately need the money for childcare or household expenses.

A Health and Welfare LPA means someone has a formal voice in your medical care and daily life decisions. Without one, doctors make treatment choices based on their own assessment, and your family's input carries no legal weight.

Both documents take about 20 to 30 minutes to set up online and cost 82 pounds each to register with the Office of the Public Guardian. For the security they provide, that's a remarkably small investment.

A Will distributes what you have. Unlike a Will, which distributes what you already own, life insurance conjures up a lump sum that didn't previously exist, purely to keep your family afloat.

Term cover (running for a fixed period, typically until the children are grown) tends to offer the best value for parents. A 35-year-old who doesn't smoke can often pick up 200,000 to 300,000 of protection for what most families spend on a Friday night pizza order. The policy runs until the children are grown, and if you don't die during the term, it simply expires.

Writing the policy "in trust" means the payout bypasses your estate entirely and goes straight to the named beneficiaries. That means no probate delays, no inheritance tax on the payout, and money arriving in your family's hands weeks after your death rather than months.

We don't sell life insurance ourselves, but we'd strongly encourage any parent without cover to look into it alongside their Will and LPAs.

Leaving a large sum directly to an 8-year-old is not a great plan. A trust lets you ringfence assets for your children until they reach an age you consider sensible, typically 18 or 21, though some parents set it at 25.

A trust can be written into your Will. Trustees (frequently the same people serving as your executors) hold the purse strings on the children's behalf. They can release money for school fees, a first car, or university accommodation, while keeping the bulk of it intact until the children hit whatever age you've specified.

Why bother? Ask yourself: would you be comfortable writing a cheque for 100,000 to your 18-year-old and walking away? Most parents wouldn't. A trust shields the money from impulse spending, unsuitable partners, and half-baked entrepreneurial ventures. A trust puts guardrails around it until the child is mature enough to manage the responsibility.

Two things that sit outside your Will but matter enormously for parents.

If you own a property as joint tenants with your partner (most married couples do), the house passes automatically to the survivor when one of you dies. The Will doesn't control this asset at all. For most parents, this is the right setup because it means the surviving partner keeps the family home without waiting for probate.

Pension death benefits and life insurance nominations should also be checked. Most pensions let you name a beneficiary for any lump sum payable on death. Check these regularly. Forms filled in a decade ago with a previous partner's name on them are more common than you'd think, and the consequences of not updating can be ugly.

If you're parenting with a partner, estate planning is a joint exercise. You need to agree on guardians, talk about who would manage the money, and make sure both of your Wills and LPAs tell the same story.

It's also worth telling your chosen guardian, your executors, and any attorneys what you've arranged. Surprising people with responsibilities after a death or incapacity helps nobody.

Keep a simple list of your assets (bank accounts, pensions, insurance policies, property) somewhere your executors can find it. A folder in a desk drawer labelled "important documents" is fine. Anything that saves your family weeks of detective work during the worst period of their lives is worth ten minutes of your time now.

Start with a Will if you haven't got one. Add LPAs if you haven't already. Review your life insurance, check your pension nominations, and have an honest conversation with your partner about who does what if something happens.

Our online service covers Wills and LPAs in one place. Most parents complete the process in under 30 minutes and walk away knowing their family is properly protected.