Author: Matt

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Secrets To Have A Frugal Wedding On A Budget

Wedding season has begun, and many of my friends are planning their weddings now. As you all know, weddings can get extremely pricey, often causing large amounts of debt. There are ways, however, to keep down the price. Here’s some tips on a reader on how to do it. 

A wedding can sometimes be a very expensive affair. In recent years, marketing and advertising campaigns have convinced grooms


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Author: Penniless Parenting

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How do I remove an executor from a will?

A bereavement is bad enough; having an issue with the executor adds to the stress.

When you make a will one of the most important things to consider is who you appoint to administer your estate: the executor. This is certainly not a decision to take lightly.

Acting as an executor is a role of great responsibility particularly if affairs are not left in good order. You need someone honest, reliable, organised and used to dealing with financial issues. Thankfully, you can have more than one.

According to STEP (Society of Trust & Estate Practitioners), the cost of probate fraud is predicted in the region of £150 million and executors, particularly with their level of control, could potentially manipulate things and help themselves to the estate. Or perhaps an executor is genuine but stalling decisions and not dealing with the estate properly.

Whether it is a human oversight or something more sinister, we asked Theo Hoppen from the Stowe Family Law office in Harrogate to join us on the blog to look at what you can do to remove an executor.

“I am often consulted by clients who are frustrated by the failure of an executor to properly administer an estate.  When a person dies, his or her Will (if they have one) will appoint one or more executors to collect in the estate’s assets and distribute them.  If there is no Will then a beneficiary of the estate under the Intestacy Rules can be appointed to administer the estate.

Sometimes a beneficiary has concerns that the executor is behaving improperly by, for example, keeping estate assets for themselves or transferring estate assets to a third party.  These disputes can be complex and very emotionally charged.  I find that the death of a loved one can exacerbate tensions within a family, sometimes leading to all-out warfare between relations.

My job is to sort out the dispute so that everyone gets what they are entitled to and move on with their lives.  Usually, the best option is to arrange a mediation session.  I find this can often resolve even the most acrimonious disputes and, importantly, the court will expect the parties to mediate before taking the matter to court.

If you bypass mediation, without a good reason, the court will hold this against you and may order you to pay some or all the other party’s legal costs if you lose your court case.

A mediator is an independent third party appointed jointly by the parties.  He or she will spend a day encouraging everyone to negotiate and resolve the dispute.  Whilst the parties pay for mediation, it is considerably cheaper than pursuing court proceedings and a much quicker process as a court case can take at least a year to conclude and sometimes longer.

If mediation fails, the court remains the only other option. The court can make various orders to sort matters out and ensure that the estate is administered correctly.  It can order that an executor is removed and replaced by someone else and also order how the estate should be administered. “

If you need advice on removing an executor or different claims against an estate please do not hesitate to contact me at theo.hoppen@stowefamilylaw.co.uk or at the details below.

The post How do I remove an executor from a will? appeared first on Stowe Family Law.


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Author: Theo Hoppen

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The Children Act has more than stood the test of time

I wrote here back in March about the thirtieth anniversary of the Children Act. My modest celebration of that event has now been joined by another, emanating from a rather more illustrious source: the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane.

The President chose the anniversary as the subject for The Nicholas Wall Memorial Lecture 2019, given on the 9th of May. For those who don’t know, Sir Nicholas was the President himself between April 2010 and December 2012, when he retired for health reasons. Sadly, Sir Nicholas suffered from dementia, and he took his own life in 2017.

In my earlier post I gave a brief outline of what the Act did, and I refer readers who don’t know to that post. Here, I just wanted to give a flavour of Sir Andrew’s speech.

Sir Andrew used the speech to point up three areas within the Act’s provisions which he said “justify comment or consideration as we mark its 30th anniversary.” The three areas came under the headings “Making Contact Work”, Child Protection and Secure accommodation. As the second and third of those are unlikely to be of particular interest to readers of this blog, I will concentrate upon the first.

Sir Andrew set out the efforts since the passing of the Act to “make contact work”, including in particular enhancing the court’s enforcement powers and changing the terminology from ‘residence’ and ‘contact’ orders to ‘child arrangements’ orders. He then asked whether these changes made a positive difference, and concluded that: “in terms of the numbers of separated parents who still turn to a magistrate or judge to sort out the arrangements for their children after parental separation, the answer, depressingly, would seem to be ‘no’.”

However, Sir Andrew did not consider this to be the fault of the Children Act, or the law that has developed under it. He said:

“The law is plain that each parent has full and equal parental responsibility and all that the court is doing when determining an application is fixing the practical arrangements for a child’s care … The courts have been plain that it is the responsibility of parents, and not judges, to determine issues that may arise between them and that this ‘responsibility’, difficult and burdensome though it may well be, is just as much part of their responsibility to do what is best for their child as some of the happier parental tasks may be.”

In other words, the law is clear that the responsibility to sort out post-separation arrangements for children lies with the parents, and the courts will only intervene if it can be shown that without a court order the child’s welfare would suffer. Or as Baroness Hale said: “To emphasise the practical reality that bringing up children is a serious responsibility, rather than a matter of legal rights, the conceptual building block used throughout the [Act] is ‘parental responsibility.’”

The Children Act, said Sir Andrew, was “essentially sound”, even if “the manner in which the delivery of dispute resolution following parental separation often falls short, or, worse, compounds the potential for harm.” That this is so, he said, demonstrates the fact that the law can only go so far in resolving what are essentially relationship difficulties within families.

Sir Andrew concluded his look at the Act with the following glowing endorsement:

“On any view, and in the view I am sure of every Family lawyer, the Children Act 1989 was ground breaking to a very high level on the seismic scale. It changed the world of children’s law and it has more than stood the test of time. Such amendments that there have been, and there have been many, have built upon, rather than removed the core structure of the Act. There is no clamour, yea not even a whisper, that the basic concepts of child law now need further reform. The architects of the legislation, and its draftsmen, simply got it right. That that is so has been, and continues to be, to the great benefit of the children and young people whose needs it was aimed to meet.”

Like Sir Andrew, I’m sure most of us can agree with that.

I recommend that you read the full speech, which you can find here.

The post The Children Act has more than stood the test of time appeared first on Stowe Family Law.


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Author: John Bolch

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Oil from Garbage

Waste at a landfill

Modern-day alchemy

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there may be an elegant solution on the horizon to the gigantic problem of garbage—and not just the kind that gets dumped in landfills, but hard-to-recycle plastics, too, along with agricultural wastes, used tires, and just about everything else. More good news: we might get to reduce dependence on foreign oil and pay less for gasoline in the process. The bad news? More cheap oil to burn means more carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, perpetuating the already dire problem of global warming.

The technology that makes it possible to do this is called the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP for short. It was developed for commercial use a couple of decades ago by a company called Changing World Technologies (now owned by Canadian firm Ridgeline Energy Services), and its first full-scale plant operated for a number of years in Carthage, Missouri. Now various other firms are taking the same technology in other directions. In any case, the idea behind TDP is not new—in fact, it’s millions of years old. Take organic matter, subject it to heat and pressure, and eventually you get oil. Of course in nature, “eventually” is usually an inconvenient number of millennia; TDP shortens that time to hours, if you can believe that.

A Well-Oiled Machine

TDP is a surprisingly straightforward five-step process. First, raw materials are fed into an industrial-grade grinder where they’re chopped up into extremely small bits and mixed with water. The mixture is then subjected to heat and pressure, breaking molecular bonds and reducing the material to simpler components in as little as 15 minutes. The next step is reducing the pressure dramatically to drive off the water; in the process, some useful minerals such as calcium and magnesium settle out as valuable byproducts. The remaining slurry is sent into a second reactor, which uses even higher temperatures to produce a hydrocarbon mixture. Finally, a distillation step divides the hydrocarbons into vaporous gas (a mixture of methane, propane, and butane), liquid oil (similar to a mixture of gasoline and motor oil), and powdered carbon.

All that to say: garbage in, (black) gold out. The process itself produces no waste materials, unless you count water, which can be recycled in the system. The gas can be used to produce heat for the machine itself; oil can be sent to refineries to be made into a variety of useful products; carbon can be turned into everything from water filters to toner cartridges; and the remaining minerals can be used as fertilizer.

Virtually any organic material can be fed into a TDP apparatus. By making adjustments to the combinations of temperature, pressure, and cooking times, various input products (referred to as feedstock) can produce a wide range of output products; the proportions of, say, gas to oil to carbon will depend on the composition of the feedstock. The first fully operational TDP system was used to recycle the waste at a turkey processing plant. All the turkey parts that weren’t used as meat—skin, bones, feathers, and so on—were fed into the machine, thus solving a serious waste problem (up to 200 tons per day) while creating commercially valuable products. But TDP can also process discarded computers, tires (even steel-belted radials), plastic bottles, agricultural waste, municipal garbage…you name it.

Almost nothing is too messy or too scary for TDP to handle. It can make clean, safe materials out of sewage, medical wastes, dioxins, and other biohazardous materials. Even anthrax, for crying out loud. Apparently the only kind of material this system can’t handle is nuclear waste—I guess you can’t have everything.

Pouring Oil on Troubled Water

Thermal depolymerization is still finding its footing for commercial use, though similar processes have been known for many years. The problem was that they were always too expensive to operate; it cost more for the fuel to decompose the garbage than the resulting materials were worth. The inventors of TDP claim that it is highly energy-efficient—better than 85% in most cases. If that is true, if it continues to be true on a large scale, and if demand is sufficiently high, then TDP may eventually be able to produce oil more cheaply than drilling, and get rid of garbage as a convenient side-effect—or vice-versa, if you prefer.

As fantastic as TDP sounds, the process does have its critics. Some engineers have expressed skepticism that the energy efficiency could be even close to what proponents claim. Even supposing that it were, the oil needs of the United States are currently so massive that if all the agricultural waste in the country were processed into oil, it would still be just a drop in the bucket (so to speak). In other words, so the argument goes, the process holds more promise as a method of recycling and waste reduction than it does as a source of fuel.

The more optimistic viewpoint is that if TDP comes into widespread use, we won’t run out of oil as long as we have garbage. But that also means there will be less incentive to reduce oil consumption or seek out cleaner alternative power sources. Ah, but I suppose every silver lining must have its cloud.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on August 3, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on June 4, 2004.


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Author: Joe Kissell

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The perils of being too eager to recover what you believe you are due

All family lawyers will be familiar with the phenomenon of the client who has a strong sense of what they are ‘due’ or entitled to when it comes to financial remedies on divorce. Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong about believing you are entitled to something, whether it be money or property, but a really strong sense of entitlement can sometimes cloud the judgment. Sometimes, for example, that party can be rather too eager to recover what they believe they are due, and end up incurring costs in a forlorn pursuit of their ‘entitlement’.

I’m not saying that the applicants in the two quite different recent cases to which I am about to refer suffered from this phenomenon, but certainly the cases act as a useful reminder of the perils of being too eager to recover what you believe you are due.

Both cases are recent judgments of Mr Justice Mostyn.

The first case is Purvis v Purvis, which concerned a rather unusual application by the husband. He was apparently convinced that the wife may have been hiding assets in the USA, which obviously should have been taken into account in any divorce settlement.

The facts of the case given in the judgment are rather ‘bare bones’, as the judgment did not require full details. Essentially, the parties began a relationship in this country in 1992, in 2001 they purchased a property in Florida, and they were married in January 2004. In July 2004 they acquired a cafeteria business also, I assume, in Florida, to which they moved at some point in that year. In December 2005 the marriage broke down and the husband returned to this country. Divorce proceedings were eventually commenced in this country in 2009, although they have yet to be finalised.

The husband made a financial remedies claim within the divorce proceedings. Obviously, both parties were required to make full disclosure of their means. However, the husband was not satisfied that the wife had provided sufficient explanation as to what had happened to the property and business in Florida. He claimed that the house is worth $250,000 and the business was profitable, with a turnover of $750,000. The wife was in sole control of both. However, the house was foreclosed in November 2008 and the company ceased to be registered in 2013.

The husband therefore applied for an order that a letter of request be issued to the authorities of the United States of America for the wife to be examined in Florida and to produce documentation to disclose the true nature of her financial resources. Mr Justice Mostyn refused the application, which he considered to be nothing more than a “fishing expedition”. The husband had no evidence as to the existence of any of the residue of the assets, he was merely “fishing” for that evidence.

The second case is Gladwell v Gladwell. This concerned an application by a husband to set aside a writ of control issued by the wife to recover a debt that was not yet due (a writ of control authorises a court enforcement officer to seize goods of a debtor in order to recover the debt).

The relevant facts of the case were that the court had made a consent order, setting out the financial settlement agreed by the parties. A term of the order was that the husband should pay to the wife the sum of £5,889 in lieu of her claims against his pension, from his share of the proceeds of sale of the parties’ timeshares in Malta.

Clearly, the payment was not due until the timeshares were sold. However, despite this, the wife issued the writ to recover the payment before the sale took place. On the 28th of March 2019 enforcement officers attended at the home of the husband. The enforcement officers’ costs had increased the debt to £8,304.72. That sum was paid by the husband on his credit cards.

The husband then applied to have the writ set aside. Without going into detail, Mr Justice Mostyn found that the writ was unlawful, and that the monies had been wrongly taken from the husband. He therefore set aside the writ and ordered that the monies be returned to the husband.

In both of these cases the applications had been misguided, quite possibly because of the applicants being too eager to recover what they believed they were entitled to. The result, however, was that the applicants had failed, and could well have incurred considerable costs for their efforts. The moral is: think hard (and preferably take the best available advice) before you act!

You can read the full report of Purvis v Purvis here, and of Gladwell v Gladwell here. As far as the latter is concerned, a word of warning: in family cases the party who was originally described as the ‘applicant’ can subsequently become the ‘respondent’, and vice versa, if the original respondent later makes an application of their own. Unsurprisingly, this can sometimes lead to a little confusion, so please bear it in mind if you read the Gladwell judgment.

The post The perils of being too eager to recover what you believe you are due appeared first on Stowe Family Law.


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Author: John Bolch

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Ischigualasto

Ischigualasto or Moon Valley, the mushroom formation, Province of San Juan, Argentina

Triassic Park in Argentina

I have a special fondness for deserts and other barren landscapes. Partly, I’m sure, it’s because of their rugged natural beauty, but I also find the lack of people and the coinciding lack of noise quite refreshing. I’ve spent plenty of time in desert regions of North America, South America, and the Middle East. One spot I missed during my trip to Argentina back in 2004 would undoubtedly have made it onto my list of favorite desert places. Located in the San Juan province in northwest Argentina, Ischigualasto Provincial Park is remote, hot, amazingly dry, and generally inhospitable, but nevertheless manages to draw over 30,000 tourists each year.

Smorgasbord of Fossils

The park takes its name from the Ischigualasto Formation, a large basin of sedimentary rock that was once a lush tropical swamp and is now a paleontologist’s playground. It contains a vast number of fossils, but its significance runs much deeper than that. It’s the only known place on the planet that contains a complete fossil record for the entire Triassic Period—a span of about 45 million years at the start of the Mesozoic Era, which began roughly 245 million years ago. What’s so significant about this period of time is that it’s when the first dinosaurs and the first mammals appeared. As a result, Ischigualasto is the best place to look for fossils of intermediate species.

A great many of the fossils in Ischigualasto are of plant-eating reptiles called rhynchosaurs, while many others are of cynodonts. Several websites I consulted unhelpfully explained that cynodonts are a group of therapsids, which are of course an order of synapsids. In English, cynodonts were a type of mammal-like reptile, a species that nicely illustrates evolution in progress. The word cynodont means “dog teeth,” referring to their mammal-like tooth structure. They walked on two legs, were covered with hair, and were warm-blooded—yet, like reptiles, they still laid eggs. You can also find some dinosaur fossils in Ischigualasto, and although there aren’t as many of them, they’re extremely significant because they’re among the oldest dinosaur remains in the world.

It’s the Rocks, Stupid

The fossils, however numerous and significant they may be, are not Ischigualasto’s biggest attraction. Tourists come to see the park’s rock formations. The Ischigualasto Formation is nicknamed “Valley of the Moon,” and although the pictures I’ve seen don’t remind me of the moon, they do certainly have an otherworldly appearance. As in Sedona, Arizona, many of the rocks and hills have a striking reddish cast, due to large concentrations of iron oxide. One rock formation, known as The Mushroom, has a broad stone cap sitting atop a much narrower column. This basic geometry, which in some cases appears to defy gravity, is typical of the formations, some of which have evocative names like The Sphinx, The Worm, and The Submarine. One particularly unusual area is a relatively flat expanse called The Ball Court, which is is covered with hundreds of natural stone spheres that evoke images of soccer balls. The park also contains petroglyphs and other artifacts of the area’s ancient human inhabitants.

Owing to its great scientific importance and its uniquely beautiful landscape, UNESCO named Ischigualasto Provincial Park, along with neighboring Talampaya National Park, a World Heritage Site in 2000. This recognition has helped to publicize the park’s existence, though the great majority of tourists come from within Argentina. Most visitors take a guided driving tour, which lasts two to four hours. People do sometimes camp in the park, but those who do are strongly urged to bring plenty of food, water, sunscreen, and shade, and to prepare for extreme temperatures (not only hot during the day but also very cold at night) and a persistent wind. Also bring your own soccer ball: kicking stone spheres puts you at an evolutionary disadvantage.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 26, 2006.


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Author: Joe Kissell