Most couples leave the house to each other outright and think no further, and for first marriages with shared children that is usually right. But an outright gift means the survivor can do anything with the property: remarry and share it, rewrite their will, or spend it down to nothing. A property trust in a will is the standard tool for couples who want something more precise: protect the survivor’s home for life, and still control where the value ultimately goes.
The life interest trust, step by step
The commonest form is a life interest trust of your share of the home (solicitors call it an interest in possession; when created by will for a spouse it is an immediate post-death interest, or IPDI). It works like this:
- Your will leaves your share of the property not to your partner outright, but to trustees
- Your partner (the life tenant) has the legal right to live in the home for life, and to any income if the property is ever sold and the money invested
- The trust usually allows downsizing: the home can be sold and a replacement bought, with the trust rolling into the new property
- When your partner dies, or remarries or moves into care if the trust says so, your share passes to the people you named: typically your own children
The survivor keeps their home, completely. Your capital keeps its destination, completely. Neither depends on anyone’s future goodwill, which is the whole point: goodwill is exactly what a survivor’s new will can revoke.
First, one piece of plumbing: tenants in common
A life interest trust can only catch your share of the home if your will controls that share. Property owned as joint tenants passes automatically to the survivor, outside any will. So couples setting up these trusts first sever the joint tenancy, becoming tenants in common, each owning a distinct half that their will can direct. Severance is a short standard notice plus a Land Registry restriction, done when the wills are made.
What these trusts are used for
- Blended families: the classic use, protecting children of a first relationship from sideways disinheritance while fully housing the second spouse
- Remarriage protection: the survivor’s remarriage cannot redirect your share
- Care fees, within honest limits: if the survivor later needs residential care, only their own share of the home is theirs; your half belongs to the trust and is not the survivor’s asset to assess. What the rules do not allow is lifetime schemes designed to hide assets you still own; deliberate deprivation rules exist and councils use them. A will trust over your own share, taking effect at your death, is the legitimate version
- Vulnerable beneficiaries: variants of the same structure can hold a share for someone who cannot safely inherit outright
The honest costs and frictions
Trustees must be chosen (often the survivor plus the adult children, which builds the negotiation into the structure). The trust needs administering: not onerous for a house, but real. Tax is mostly kind for spouse IPDIs, the spouse exemption applies at the first death and the trust property is treated as the survivor’s for inheritance tax later, but this is exactly the territory where an estate crosses from simple to complex, and where a reviewed, properly drafted will earns its fee. A badly homemade trust clause is worse than none.
Where Willful fits
Trust structures like these are what Willful’s complex tier exists for: the interview asks the questions that reveal whether you need one, the drafting is handled, and an SRA-regulated solicitor reviews the result. If a plain mirror will serves you better, the questions will say so; the right answer is sometimes the simpler document.