Why we built Solace

The problem we started with

When someone dies in the UK, a single person usually inherits a second job. They are the executor, or the administrator where there is no will, and the work is real: dozens of organisations to notify, hundreds of pages of forms, valuations to obtain, deadlines fixed by law, and months of following up with institutions that rarely reply the first time.

Most people do this once in their lives, with no training, at the worst possible moment. The professional alternative (handing the estate to a solicitor) is competent but expensive, and it is often priced as a percentage of the estate rather than the work involved.

We thought the middle ground was missing: a team that does the work for you at a fair price for the work involved, while leaving you in control and informed at every step.

What Solace does

We take on the administration end to end. A named person looks after your estate and handles:

• A plan for this estate: every step, in order, with the deadlines that apply, so you and the family always know where things stand.
• Finding the assets and debts: writing to institutions for date-of-death balances, and querying public registries and tracing services to surface accounts, pensions and policies nobody remembered.
• The paperwork: keeping the will, certificates, valuations and grants in order, and preparing the probate and inheritance tax forms for you to check and sign.
• The correspondence: notifying banks, pension and insurance providers, utilities, HMRC, the DWP and the local council, then chasing each one until it is closed off.

You approve anything that needs a decision or a signature. Nothing consequential happens without you.

How we work

• The family stays in control. We do the legwork and surface the decisions. We never make the decisions that carry legal responsibility, because that responsibility is not ours to take.
• Plain English, always. The vocabulary of probate is a barrier in itself. Everything we write, and everything we say on the phone, is meant to be understood on a bad day.
• Free information stays free. Our guides are open to anyone who needs them, whether or not they ever become a customer.
• We are clear about what we are not. See below: the boundary matters more in this category than in most.

Who is behind Solace

What Solace is not

Company details