Peter’s Inheritance Tax problem

Jim told me I needn't worry about the future - I'd be provided for and I'd always have the house. Sadly after he died I discovered it wasn't as simple as he'd thought.

I was young when I met Jim, only 24. He turned out to be the love of my life. It was just one of those amazing things.

Our eyes did meet across a crowded room, like in the books. It was at the gallery where I was having my first show. And I knew I just had to meet him, that this might be the turning point of my life.

Jim was nearly twenty years older than me – but what does that matter when you’re in love. And he was very distinguished looking. I moved in with him and we built a little extension for my studio so I could continue working from home. I’m a sculptor. I was getting good commissions but it was hardly a living. But Jim had a good job – he’d been working for the same company for years.

We had twelve happy years and then Jim got cancer. He would always try to talk about how I would be provided for after he died, but to be honest I never really wanted to discuss it. It was too painful. I didn't want to think about it, but he did. I remember that he’d taken advice on his pension. The trustees of the company pension scheme took the old-fashioned view that they would only pay a death-in-service benefit to a wife or husband, not a gay partner. This was before civil partnerhsips came in. So Jim had decided that it would be better not to nominate me to get the money. “If I don’t nominate you”, he said, “they’ll have to pay it to my estate. And you know that I’ve left you everything in my will”.

And so he had. He’d done it on the internet and made a nice, tidy homemade will leaving everything to me. It was all signed and witnessed and the terms were clear. But after his death I was shocked to find out that there was inheritance tax to pay on the estate. The value of the house, and the death-in-service benefit (three times Jim’s final salary) – both of which had increased rapidly in the last five years – took the estate over the tax limit, which was £263,000 at the time, and I had to pay 40% of everything over that amount.

I was left with no choice, I had to sell our home. I was told by the solicitor who sorted out Jim’s estate that if Jim had put the house into our joint names, only half the value would have counted in the estate and I could have kept it. The solicitor also said that, in an ideal world we’d have taken out some life insurance before Jim got ill, and I could have used that money too. But we just didn't know.

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