I must say Ronald you are being particularly crotchety at the moment.
People of your age typically take tablets and get dyspepsia, might I suggest that if you have a pink tablet you take for your dyspepsia and a blue tablet you take to even up your equilibrium, if you haven't got dyspepsia at the moment pop into Specsavers later on for a free eye test.
The time subsequent to a death and prior to the funeral isn't a great time to be thinking OTOH you can't choose what you think about and I've woken up this morning much happier.
I had forgotten the "ice maiden" scenario and I am astonished you have remembered it. You will remember that Cand was (just a bit) unpredictable, but I had forgotten that Bern is wealthy rock solid. If £25K is owing to the tax man and causing a problem she will pay it, end of problem.
So we will all emerge out of this better off than we ever could have envisaged and Mary will have had five years living with Al happily pottering around her usual haunts with her usual friends, none of that could have happened in any other scenario.
I expected Peter Crosland to pop in with a: "Why didn't your solicitor suggest an X trust?" This is Usenet and:
1) We paid a solicitor to sort out our IHT problem 2) We now have a massive IHT problem??on the face of it looks bad, Everyone was agreed that a trust fund was too expensive. Maybe it was an option, if Mary had lived out her 7 years there would still have been a problem:
? is the "problem", Daytona's spreadsheet (it takes a while to download) shows it graphically. No one could have predicted this.
You have been an absolute star for Al Ronald. She is going to hand everything over to the professionals whose job it is to make life run smoothly.