gifts out of income - regular pattern

[paulnotcluedup]

With gifts out of income - there's plenty of evidence that the deceased intended to gift their maximum surplus income each year to a combination of charities (as a class of people) and family members (as a class of people).

The income varied year-on-year mostly due to interest rates going up and expenditure was fairly similar.

Owing to age, there were difficulties getting to banks in person or using online services - as such, the 'gifts' were made sporadically throughout the year 10k here, 50k there and sometimes carried forward from the previous year.

I can see the importance of 'regular expenditure' in the IHT manual. The overall pattern was to gift 'maximum surplus' and this the maximum was 'gifted' away without touching capital.

Any advice on how HMRC would view this pattern would be greatly appreciated.

[AGoodman]

I would consider that a regular pattern and submit on that basis. As you will have seen, the rules are pretty vague so there is a lot of leeway over how they operate.