National Will Safe Blog

“Some years ago, I prepared a Will, and Property & Affairs and Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney documents for a lovely lady, a widow, who wanted to get her affairs in order “just in case”.

Recently I received a phone call from my client’s very distressed son.  His mum has been diagnosed with advanced dementia and was moving into permanent care.  The son was finding this very difficult to cope with and to add to his anguish he’d been turned away by the bank when trying to register the Property & Financial Affairs LPA with them.  It transpired that he’d just taken in the OPG letter which stated that the LPA had been registered some years before.

I checked our records and discovered that we had, as instructed, despatched the registered LPA documents to his mother by registered post and she had signed a receipt for the documents, but wanted to keep them herself, and had declined the option of secure storage.

The son then turned the house upside down, but could not find any trace of the registered Lasting Power of Attorney documents and assumes that his mother simply threw them away during the early stages of her dementia.  We were of course able to apply to the OPG for duplicate documents but the delay and missing paperwork caused a lot of unnecessary anxiety.

There is no sign of the Will either.  The family  now of course wish they had encouraged their mother to pay for secure storage, or had paid for it themselves!

In every case, we offer our clients secure storage with NWS to prevent just such problems, to avoid the worry that sensitive and important documents can get either lost, damaged, or fall into the wrong hands.”

Eleanor – Think Wills & Probate

With its latest financial year ending on 30 June 2016, the directors of National Will Safe are now in a position to report that the company has had a record breaking year, as the average number of new clients storing their documents with the firm each month has increased by 50% in the last 2 years. The company now stores over 24,000 documents for 16,000 individual clients.

When looking at where the increase has come from, National Will Safe Director Paul Sharpe said, “The increase has come from all areas. We now have more professional partners recommending our services and those professional partners are successfully storing documents with us for more of their clients. It’s a win-win situation with some of our partners receiving regular monthly commission payments of thousands of pounds – with no costs or expenses to pay out of those earnings”.

Fellow director Jane Barlow commented “We have also seen an increase in the transfer of documents into our facility from partner firms who have previously offered their own storage service. Usually this is part of a planned retirement or exit strategy but occasionally it’s been part of a crisis caused by the death or sudden illness of a business owner. The planned transfers have proved to be far more successful than the crisis transfers, but in all cases it has removed hassle from the family at a stressful time. “

So why should you choose to recommend National Will Safe to store your documents?

• National Will Safe stores the documents in a specialist document archive.
• National Will Safe pays for the documents to be transferred to its offices and from its offices to you or your client or their executor at the time of need.
• National Will Safe insures the documents stored against loss and the consequences of loss.
• National Will Safe scan the documents and send copies to you for your records if required.
• National Will Safe collects payments from your clients at rates chosen by you.
• National Will Safe collects payments by direct debit, so payments can be easily changed (increased) through the direct debit system with a simple notification to the payer.
• National Will Safe pays you a commission every month based on the fees it has collected from your clients, having deducted VAT and its small administration charge.
• National Will Safe pays your commission to you or your nominated business successor even after you have exited or retired from the profession.
• National Will Safe will deal with your clients and their bereaved relatives for you when you are on holiday, off sick, or worse.
• National Will Safe doesn’t offer legal document drafting or probate services so you can be sure that your clients are safe.

To find out more about starting to offer the National Will Safe service and/or transferring existing stored documents to us, please call Jane Barlow on 0345 644 6896.