Two mothers have won a landmark Court of Appeal case against former Leicester City captain Wes Morgan over around £137,000 each in unpaid child maintenance. The judgment, handed down this week, closes off an argument that could have let higher-earning parents walk away from court-ordered payments simply by getting their Child Maintenance Service (CMS) assessment reduced. The case involves a footballer, but the principle applies to any separated parent whose child maintenance arrangements combine a CMS calculation with a court order.

Home sellers cut asking prices on more than 3,000 properties a day in September, the highest level for 15 years, according to Rightmove figures reported by the BBC. The average reduction was nearly 7%, around £21,000 on a typical home, and homes that needed a price cut took 119 days to find a buyer, compared with 39 days for those priced right first time. Several of the sellers who spoke to the BBC had something in common: they were selling a late parent's home. If you're an executor in that position, a slow market creates pressures that ordinary sellers don't face.

Mortgage fixes under 5% are disappearing, MoneySavingExpert reported this week. The cheapest two-year and five-year fixed rates for buyers now stand at 4.78% and 4.95%, compared with 3.87% and 3.98% a year ago. With the Bank of England's next base rate decision due on 5 November and markets expecting rates to rise, most of the attention is on whether to fix now or wait. But for anyone already partway through buying a home, there's a more urgent question: will your mortgage offer still be valid when you complete?

Around 24,000 probate applications in England and Wales are currently "stopped", sitting in a queue while the Probate Registry waits for information that should have been supplied in the first place. That figure comes from HM Courts & Tribunals Service's October update to probate practitioners, published by the ICAEW on 22 October. The headline numbers look reassuring: the average wait from application to grant of probate is now around five weeks. But that average hides a two-tier system. Clean, complete applications move quickly. Anything with a gap gets pulled aside, and that's where months can disappear.