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My husband and I made a French will before we were married. Now that we are married do we need to make brand new wills?Also, if we want to include a statement in that will can we just do it as a separate addition or is it necessary to make out complete new wills?
Already Tried: Nothing yet
Hello,
Thank you for your question.
Please could you tell me if, when you both made your wills, you were already in your relationship together?
Please could you tell me if you have children now or from a previous marriage?
Is there anything in your will you wish to change?
I look forward to your response.
Just to quickly explain our situation. We have bought a property in France and are now going to retire there full-time hopefully in July, 2012.
When we did our French wills we were living together in a relationship so my surname then was from my previous marriage. We married a year ago and I just wondered if we needed to change both wills to record my new married name. Or is it still legal with my previous name? Also just to mention that we have a "usufruit" clause within the wills.
We both have two children from a previous marriage.
I have been reading about this new EU legislation, to come into effect in 2015, regarding expats living in France stating in their wills that they "want the law of the state of their nationality to apply to their estate and not French inheritance law". If this is the case then I would like to add this somehow into my French will. I just wondered if I could do it as an addition or would a whole new will need to be drawn up?
Look forward to hearing back from you soon,
Mrs Louise Dawson
Thank you for the further information.
I have a couple of more questions:
Did you get married in France or the UK?
Does your French carte de sejour reflect your married name?
Would you want your estate to be dealt with under English law if given the choice?
I look forward to hearing from you.
We were married in the UK.
We haven't yet got a French carte de sejour as we don't intend to be resident just yet but are only using the property as a holiday home. As I said earlier, we hope to retire there from July, but it could be a few months later.
Ideally we want our estate to be dealt with under English law if we could change things but I was under the impression that we couldn't change anything now. That is why I am interested in the new EU law that is supposedly to come into effect from 2015 but apparently we need to include a statement in our wills about it. It may be that we can't do anything about our wills until it actually comes into being in 2015?
Look forward to hearing from you.
Louise Dawson
Thanks for the confirmation.
Firstly, as regards XXXXX XXXXX will, I would suggest that you both make variations of your wills to reflect your married name. This is because under French law, once you have start to use your married name, you are required to use it for official documents as confirmed here:http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/F868.xhtml
This can be done before a notaire as explained here in more detail:http://vosdroits.service-public.fr/particuliers/F16278.xhtml
Secondly, as to the issue of the proposed EU Regulation on successions, this is still currently a proposal and is not yet law. Once it becomes law, it will give you the choice to apply English law to your will. However, it is not clear at this present time whether the UK will sign up to the Regulation since it has an opt-out in this respect. The situation will only be clear once the Regulation is adopted by the EU Council.
There is therefore no need at present to reflect this in your will. Once the EU Regulation is adopted, you should enter into a will governed by English law and revoke your French will.
I hope this answers your question. Please don't forget to click accept. Thanks in advance.
Experience: Lawyer with Maîtrise en droit & Licence spéciale en droit européen.