The heirs thus avoid having to pay the debts of the deceased person. An heir is never obliged to accept an estate and can waive it free of charge if the deceased leaves more debts than income, or more precisely if the amount received by the heir, after deduction of all debts, does not not exceed 5,219 euros.
“If an heir does not take any action, the State will consider that he accepts the succession. He will then have to pay the debts of the deceased, enter a declaration of succession. To avoid this, the heir has every interest in drafting a declaration of waiver with a notary”, explains Sylvain Bavier, spokesperson for Notaire.be.
Such a procedure is free of charge for the heir. In doing so, however, he renounces all the property of the estate. He cannot then claim any personal item from the estate, not even photos for example.
In Belgium, the number of renunciations of inheritance increases from year to year. From 2019 to 2020, the number of free waivers increased from 39,794 to 41,702. The phenomenon increased further in 2021 to reach 44,155. For the period from March 2018 to April 2022, the Federation of Notaries recorded no less than 173,403 Belgians who refused to inherit from a notary, i.e. an average of 3,468 per month.