When preparing your Will, it is important to include up to date information about those you wish to benefit. These days family and friends are often spread far and wide and it is helpful to know where to start looking when the time comes.
We were recently instructed on behalf of a Personal Representative to identify and find two beneficiaries named in a Will prepared not long before the deceased died.
Not too difficult a task you might think. Unfortunately there were no available addresses for either beneficiary although it was known neither lived in the UK and they were family rather than friends of the deceased. Still, armed with their full names and the assistance of some helpful relatives, it should be a relatively straightforward task to track them down, right? Alas, no.
The beneficiaries were known in the Will only by their very popular first names. Furthermore, the known family of the deceased (who would have otherwise inherited almost all the estate on the grounds of intestacy) denied any knowledge of either beneficiary, whom they believed were figments of the deceased’s fertile imagination – with of course the helpful consequence that most of the estate would then pass to them.
Naturally it made no sense for the deceased to deliberately leave his estate to phantoms and in doing so created a headache for the Personal Representative. Despite the resolute opposition of the known family, we kept digging.
Finding missing beneficiaries
How does a Personal Representative proceed in such circumstances?
Once all reasonable enquiries are exhausted, one option is to obtain Missing Beneficiary Insurance (MBI).
This would allow the Personal Representative to distribute the estate – in this case to the known family in accordance with the rules of intestacy – safe in the knowledge that if the two beneficiaries did step forward some time later, their entitlement would be met by the insurers and not personally by the Personal Representative.
The problem here was the insurance premium would be prohibitively expensive, as the beneficiaries were likely to be relatively young and could reappear by chance at any time.
Heir hunters
We decided to engage the services of a well-known firm of heir hunters on a no find/no fee basis. This step was inevitable as it is a prerequisite of a MBI that a reputable genealogist’s report be obtained before cover can be put in place. However, even the heir hunters were sceptical of successfully piecing together the family portrait across various countries with such little to go on.
However, with one crucial bit of otherwise insignificant information, it was possible many months later to ascertain the identity of the deceased’s long dead father’s home village and from there the path eventually led to the missing beneficiaries.
The beneficiaries were naturally surprised and delighted our efforts had eventually paid off. And it was of course far better for the beneficiaries to have met the costs and commission due to the heir hunters than to unknowingly lose their entire inheritance.
All this could have been avoided had the deceased properly instructed a solicitor to draw up a simple Will with accurate and up to date information about those he wished to benefit. Had that happened, the beneficiaries would have received the bulk of the estate and the Personal Representative could have avoided a protracted battle with those who were determined to take the estate in their place.
This case is a good example of why it is important to regularly update your Will, not only to reflect changing circumstances in your life, but also to ensure a smoother path at a difficult time for your family/Personal Representatives and hopefully save the estate the time and expense of tracking down those you otherwise wished to benefit.
How Nelsons can help
Kevin Modiri is a Partner in our Dispute Resolution team, specialising in inheritance dispute claims.
If you have any questions in relation to the subjects discussed in this article, please contact Kevin or another member of our expert team in Derby, Leicester or Nottingham on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form.