Don’t let a basic Will cost your children their inheritance.

It is a trust set up inside your Will. When you die, the assets you have chosen to place inside the trust — commonly your share of the family home, sometimes savings or investments too — pass into the trust rather than outright to your spouse or partner. Your spouse (the "life tenant") has the right to live in the property and to receive any income from the trust for the rest of their life. The "Flexible" part is the trustees' discretionary power to advance capital where you say in the Will that they may, so the structure can respond to changing circumstances. When the life tenant dies, the trust ends and the assets pass to the beneficiaries you chose when you made the Will.

Both, if you want it to. The home is the most common asset placed into a Life Interest Will Trust because it is usually the family's largest single asset, but the same trust can hold investments, savings or other liquid wealth that you want to ring-fence for your chosen beneficiaries. What is included depends on how the Will is drafted — we walk through the right scope for your circumstances in the discovery call.

A Will Trust is one part of considered later-life planning, not a standalone care-fee tactic. The mechanism is your exercise of testamentary freedom: because the trust is created on your death by your Will, the assets that pass into it never belong to your surviving spouse. When a local authority later means-tests the surviving spouse for care funding, those assets are not theirs to be assessed. This is a fundamentally different planning route from lifetime gifts or lifetime trusts (which sit under a separate set of "deliberate deprivation" rules). For most clients a Will Trust sits alongside up-to-date Wills, Lasting Powers of Attorney and other estate-planning steps — care fees are one of the things it touches, not the headline.

The trustees can sell the property and either acquire a replacement home for the surviving spouse or invest the proceeds so the spouse continues to receive income or use. The flexibility built into the trust is what protects your spouse from being locked in — they are never homeless and never without provision. The point of the structure is to honour your wishes about who eventually inherits, not to constrain your spouse's day-to-day life.

These are two of the scenarios the structure is designed to handle. If your spouse later remarries, the law treats any existing Will as revoked — without a trust, your share of the assets could pass to a new spouse or new family rather than to your children. With a Will Trust, your share is held for your nominated beneficiaries from the day you die, irrespective of what happens to your spouse afterwards. The same logic protects against a beneficiary going bankrupt, divorcing, or otherwise being in difficult circumstances when your spouse later dies — the trustees have flexibility to hold the share until the time is right.

Safe Harbour Legal draws up Wills containing a Flexible Life Interest Will Trust on a fixed fee. The exact figure depends on the complexity of your estate — whether the trust covers property only or also investments, whether there are unusual provisions for a particular beneficiary, the number of trustees and so on — but every fee is quoted and agreed in writing before any work starts. The guide includes a chapter on what to expect, and the 30-minute discovery call ends with a written quote if you decide to proceed.