If, as an adult heir, you accept an estate without question, you are privately liable for the debts of the estate. Those debts include, for example, debts owed to the children of a previously deceased spouse of the deceased. You can avoid this liability by accepting benefits.
You may have accepted the estate cleanly and then find out that there are more debts than assets. Since 1 September 2016, the law offers additional protection. Namely, you can ask the subdistrict court within three months after you became aware of a debt to still accept beneficiairy. There is also another possibility to request the subdistrict court, after the liquidation or division of the estate, to have to pay the debt only insofar as it can be paid from what you have obtained from the estate.
In both cases, the debt must be one you did not know and should not have known. The latter in particular can be tricky in some cases, so it remains important to be careful.
The advice is therefore to accept beneficiair if you are not absolutely sure that there are no debts. The additional petition and evidence to be provided, makes the process more expensive and less certain afterwards.
For more information on pure or beneficial acceptance, please contact us.
pkooijman@kooijmanautar.nl
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