Who gets the cottage? In Cornwall that question is asked in more families than almost anywhere else, because a modest house bought decades ago may now be the most valuable thing a person owns, and because so many of those houses stand in a county that the children had to leave to find work. A will solicitor in Truro spends much of the week on exactly this: how to leave a home fairly between a child who stayed and one who moved to Bristol, whether a holiday-let business should keep running after a death, and how to stop inheritance tax forcing a sale.
Cornwall has one of the oldest populations in England, and the work follows from that. Lasting powers of attorney, one for money and one for health, let a family act when dementia or a stroke arrives; without them relatives face an application to the Court of Protection. Care-fee planning is a constant question, and so is the position of unmarried partners, who inherit nothing under the intestacy rules however long they have lived together. Farming families around Truro, Helston and the clay country have an added reason to visit a solicitor now: changes to agricultural and business property relief have made succession planning for the farm more pressing than it has been for a generation.
When someone dies, the same firms deal with probate: valuing the estate, settling tax with HMRC, obtaining the grant and distributing to the beneficiaries. An estate with a farm, a fishing boat or a holiday let is rarely simple, and executors are personally responsible for getting it right.
Fixed fees are the norm for single and mirror wills and for lasting powers of attorney; probate may be charged at a fixed fee, hourly or as a percentage of the estate, so ask which.
The solicitors listed below write wills and administer estates in and around Truro, verified firms shown first. Read wills, trusts and probate explained, how much a will costs, what probate costs and what a lasting power of attorney is, or see the general guide to will solicitors.
