What are the options?
When it comes to a person’s last will, drawing up a will is often the most obvious of all possible decisions. In order to regulate the estate, however, other legal steps can also be taken, which can certainly have their advantages. Attorney Dr. Georg Weienfels, expert in inheritance law and operator of the “Erbrecht-Ratgeber” Internet portal.
Will versus contract of inheritance
As Weienfels explains, an inheritance contract is a contractual arrangement between two or more people, which is always concluded by a notary. The object of the agreement is the property of a person to be inherited. The German Civil Code, BGB for short, states in 1941: “The testator can appoint an heir by contract, arrange legacies and conditions and choose the applicable inheritance law.”
So an inheritance contract specifies the distribution of an inheritance after a person’s death – just like a will. The difference to a will, however, is that heirs sign an inheritance contract while the testator is still alive, which creates a stronger binding effect. Such a contractual obligation does not apply in the case of a will.
That’s what experts say
As far as the general conditions of an inheritance contract are concerned, there are no binding specifications concerning the heirs. For example, contractual partners do not necessarily have to be related or related by marriage to one another in order to be able to make claims, according to the experts from “t-online“.
Jan Bittler, an expert on inheritance law from the German Association for Inheritance Law and Asset Succession, told the “Sddeutsche Zeitung” as follows on this subject: “The safest way is always a transfer during the lifetime of the testator”.
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