When someone dies, it’s rarely just the grief that families are left to deal with. There’s a practical side too, and for whoever has been named as executor, that often means untangling exactly what the deceased owed before anything can be handed out to beneficiaries. It’s a question we’re asked constantly at Family Lawyers Glasgow:…
When someone dies, their affairs don’t just come to a natural close on their own. Someone has to step in and deal with the estate – the money, the property, the debts, the paperwork – and bring it all to a proper conclusion. In Scotland, this process is known as winding up an estate, or…
Losing someone close to you is hard enough without having to untangle a legal process at the same time. But if you’ve been named as an executor, or you’re simply trying to understand what happens to a loved one’s estate in Scotland, you’ve probably come across the word “executry” and wondered exactly what it means….
A surprising number of people assume that a will only counts if a solicitor has drawn it up. That isn’t quite true, and this often comes as a surprise to clients who come to us halfway through writing one themselves. In Scotland, you can technically write a will without a solicitor, provided it meets certain…
When someone dies, the words “testate” and “intestate” suddenly matter a great deal, even though most people have never heard either term until they need to understand them. In the simplest terms, a person who dies testate has left a valid will setting out what should happen to their estate. Someone who dies intestate has not – either because…
When someone dies in Scotland, one of the first questions families ask is a practical one: who actually deals with everything? Who is legally responsible for winding up the estate, sorting the money, paying the debts, and eventually making sure everything goes to the right people? It’s a fair question, and for most people the…
If you’ve just been named as an executor after a death in Scotland, and you’re also due to inherit something from the estate, you’re probably wondering whether that’s actually allowed. It’s one of the questions we hear most often at Family Lawyers Glasgow, and the short answer is yes – an executor can also be…
Losing someone close to you is hard enough without then discovering there’s no will in place to say what should happen to their money, their home, or the things they’ve spent a lifetime gathering. It happens far more often than people expect. In fact, most of the families we speak with at Family Lawyers Glasgow…
Dealing with a death in Scotland is never straightforward, even when everything on paper looks fairly simple. Somewhere between the funeral, the phone calls to banks, and the quiet moments of grief, someone has to start gathering paperwork. That someone is usually the executor, and in many cases they’ve never done anything like this before….
Most people assume that if they die without a will, their money and belongings will simply pass to “next of kin” – whoever that happens to be. In Scotland, it doesn’t quite work like that. When someone dies without a will in Scotland and they have no spouse, civil partner, or children, a specific legal…