Wills 'I thought if I named him, he'd get his inheritance'

In this extract from her book, Rhiannon Gogh, whose son is autistic, says parents often aren't aware specialist planning is needed to leave money to a vulnerable dependant

- Rhiannon Gogh Finance expert

As parents to an autistic son, my husband and I found it hard to accept his diagnosis. Developmental milestones were missed, and the difference between Tristan and others became stark. It could not be ignored, denied or explained away – our beautiful son was profoundly autistic.

Tristan was offered a place at a school for children with autism, and every Wednesday morning for a year, I was invited into the school to learn how to interact, play and communicate with our boy. It helped me understand what his future might look like. I could see that he might never talk, work, drive a car or have his own family – he could be dependent on us for the rest of his life.

Naturally, we would look after him for as long as we could – until, of course, we couldn’t. What would happen to our son when we were no longer here? That worry consumed us for years.

I stumbled upon special needs planning in 2016 when Tristan was six. A chartered financial adviser at the time, I heard the phrase "disabled person’s trusts" at a networking event, and my ears pricked up. I’d not heard the phrase before.

I know now that a disabled or vulnerable person’s trust is one of the two most common types of trust used to protect and support disabled people. Rather than being given or left to the vulnerable person themselves, money can be held in a trust, with others (the trustees) responsible for looking after it.

The other most common type is a discretionary trust, and the type of trust that a family uses will depend on their aims and circumstances.

At that time, I didn’t know there were specialist trusts that could protect my son – who is now 15 – and, honestly, I felt ashamed that it had taken a chance meeting for me to learn about them.