Caring for Aging Parents: Inheritance or Donation as a Token of Gratitude

Sometimes, children take care of their parents when they reach an advanced age and need some attention. It can even be that a single son or daughter takes charge of these cares alone, despite having siblings. When this occurs, it is common for parents to want thank you in some way for the time that has been dedicated to themand one way to do it is through inheritance or with a donation.

One of the most frequently asked questions in these cases is whether it is possible for the parents to Donate your home to your child in exchange for care they receive. The answer is affirmative, they explain from the web Lawyers and Inheritancesas long as “the succession rights of forced heirs are not infringed“.

How to donate a home in exchange for care

“What happens is that the heirs can bring up from the inheritance those assets that the deceased donated alive”, they explain. That is why they recommend being very careful in this type of donation. Thus, the first thing would be assess whether we are harming the rights of the rest of the heirs when donating a home to a single person.

If we take into account the concepts of strict legitimate (a person must leave to all his heirs one third of the inheritance in equal parts), the third improvement (a part of the inheritance can be left to improve the part corresponding to one of the heirs) and one third freely available (the part of your inheritance that you want to leave to a person regardless of whether they are related or not), this means that a person can donate their home if its value is equivalent to two thirds of the inheritance (the improvement third and the freely available third), plus the part of the third of legitimate strict that would correspond to the heir or heiress to whom you want to donate.

“This will occur if there are other assets in the estate that perfectly cover the part of the strict legitimate that corresponds to the other heirs”, they point out.

If the donor decides to donate his home in exchange for the care of a person, he can also resort to the figure of the donation with snack waiverthat is to say, that you can decide in your will that you do not want collation between the forced heirs, as long as, again, the strict legitimate of the other heirs is not harmed.

“The collation will not take place between the forced heirs if the donor I would have so expressly provided or if the donee repudiates the inheritance, except in the case in which the donation must be reduced because it is useless”, is indicated in article 1036 of the Civil Code.

remunerative donation

As an alternative to donating the house in exchange for care, especially if you only have one house and several children (it is very likely that doing so will harm the rest of the heirs), it is the remunerative donationwhich consists of the donation of housing as payment for care received“as long as they are not enforceable debts,” they clarify.

As it is not clear if this type of donation could be collacable, it is best to make clear the price of paid services. In any case, the dispensation of collation cannot harm the legitimate one either.

Donate a home while you’re alive, leave it as an inheritance or donate money?

If we doubt between one option or another, we must take into account the differences between the two, as explained by the digital residential platform Casavo, and one of the main ones is time.

And it is that, in a donation, the transmission of the property is carried out after the same signaturewhile in the case of inheritance it is necessary that the person making the will dies.

On the other hand, remember that the two operations need the payment of your taxes correspondingregulated by the Inheritance and Donation Tax Law, but this tax is ceded to the autonomous communities, so in some regions it may be more expensive to inherit or receive a gift than in others. The value of the inheritance, the degree of kinship or the age of the heirs will be other factors to take into account.

If, on the other hand, we consider donating money instead of the donation of a homefrom See pointed out in an analysis that this second option is more tax advantageous in most communities, although it will vary depending on the legislation of each one.