I'm Graeme Stewart. I've been an estate planner for fifteen years and still am, sitting with three or four families a day. The advice is rarely the hard part — the records are. These are the two packs I wish I could hand people.
Gifting from surplus income comes up several times a week in my work. It is one of the most useful tools there is for reducing inheritance tax, and one of the most misunderstood. Most people get the idea right and the paperwork wrong — and it was almost always their executors who found that out, years later, when it was too late to do anything about it.
That gap always bothered me. A tax specialist can charge thousands to set this up properly, but the process itself, once you know it, is not complicated. It is a documentation problem dressed up as a technical one.
So there are two packs here, because inheritance tax catches people at two quite different moments: while you are still planning, and after somebody has died and the job lands on whoever is named in the will.
Start with the situation rather than the product. The Executor Kit appears under both, because it does a different job depending on when you pick it up.
Section 21 of the Inheritance Tax Act lets you gift surplus income out of your estate with no cap and no seven-year wait — if you can evidence it. This is how you evidence it: the rule in plain English, the letters, and a tracker laid out the way HMRC form IHT403 asks for the figures.
How it worksFilled in now, by you, while you still know where everything is. Your executor inherits a complete record instead of a filing cabinet and a guess — and the inheritance tax position is worked out before it is urgent.
What’s insideEverything an executor has to find, chase, value and file — in the order it happens, with the letters already written and the deadlines marked. The standard kit covers administering the estate. The Inheritance Tax Edition adds the tax and pension parts for estates that will pay it.
Not sure which edition? The free estate check works out whether there is inheritance tax to deal with, and tells you.
For years the standard advice was to leave your pension untouched, because it sat outside your estate. The Finance Act 2026 ended that.
Estates that were never near the threshold are about to cross it simply because the pension now counts. Both packs are built for it, and there is a full explanation of what your family would actually pay if you want the detail first.
Both are free, and neither asks for an email address before it gives you an answer.
Works out whether an estate pays inheritance tax, either side of the April 2027 pension change, using the real allowances.
Fills the official forms needed to transfer a property after a death — AP1, AS1, DJP and the identity forms.
Both tools, and the Executor Kit, can be licensed under your own branding for your clients. How licensing works →