buying unmarried

[Brian & GeriWe are renovating in Limousin and hope to move to]

Hi Debra, Teamedup

I am really sorry you feel I have misled you.

For our part we have the written advice from both a French Notaire and a Barrister, independent the one from the other, and they concur. Should this advice prove false we will be able to sue them for any loss. The answer is unique to OUR situation.

Teamedup - I find it difficult to see the relevance of your last post. Getting into harvests and agriculture etc is really obscuring the point.

Debra - we should get together over a bottle of wine (or more) and thrash it out together - the 4 of us.

Since I am very anxious NOT to mislead I will withdraw from this discussion.

Brian

[Teamedup]

As you can see a usufruit covers many things. That is simply what the service public site says about it.

Sueing a notaire, now there is a drole d'idee.

I hope that your notaire and barrister have got the situation sorted out for you, but it is complicated and I still haven't understood what you have done or what you have paid for. And I do know someone who in my opinion is always very careful about getting all the facts straight. In fact they as a couple were convinced that it was all done to cover everything, including enfants by another marriage, and lo and behold, he died and it was a right mess.

We all do our best and remember that any children concerned can contest if they believe that their 'rights' are not being taken care of.

[Debra]

Teamedup, the discussion is about whether you can buy usufruit separately from the 'naked property', thereby achieving a similar effect to leaving the usufruit of a property to a spouse in a will.  I didn't think you could do this if you had children from a prior marriage, but the more I think about it I was more than likely wrong, confusing the legalities of purchasing with the inheritance laws.  After all, if this is possible and you buy it that way in the first place, the inheritance laws don't come into it, do they?  The offspring concerned would be unable to sue because they would inherit their parent's property in its entirety (the naked property - the usufruit the parent had owned over the other partner's property would die with them).

For instance, if I now gifted the usufruit to my share of our properties to my hubby (though at this stage, when we already own it, this would attract any relevant gift tax), if he survived me he would own his share of the property and the usufruit to all of it, with the naked property now being split between him and whoever I left my share of it to.  Once he passed on, his naked property would pass to whoever he left it to, the usufruit would pass to the then owners of the naked property, presumably in the same proportions as they owned the naked property. 

The doubt remaining for me is whether an en tontine clause is necessary to do this - ie can't you just buy it that way in the first place?  Also, an en tontine clause doesn't mean you don't pay inheritance tax (though various sources differ on whether its on the whole value of the property/usufruit involved or half of it).

ps I had to post about this one more time, now I've understood the principle of it, in case my previous postings confused the issue!