Your guide to UK inheritance tax and trusts 4 Planning for the future Without IHT planning, your beneficiaries could be faced with a large tax bill when you die. They may even have to sell assets, such as the family home, in order to pay the bill. With some forward planning you can help ensure that the people you want to benefit from your estate actually do benefit. One of your first considerations should be to make a will to ensure your estate goes to the people you want it to. For more information on wills, please see page 9. The first key help available is the ‘spouse exemption’, which allows all assets to pass from one spouse/civil partner * to the other when the first person dies, with no IHT to pay. However, you should not rely solely on this exemption as it sometimes acts only to delay the problem. For married couples or those in a civil partnership, it is possible to transfer any unused nil-rate band from a spouse or civil partner who died before you, giving the second spouse or civil partner to die up to twice the current nil-rate band. If your spouse/civil partner is non-UK domiciled, the spouse exemption is currently restricted to £325,000 (see page 11). * As defined by the Civil Partnership Act 2004.