What Happens to Inheritances in Family Law Matters

In this video, Page Provan Managing Director, Bruce Provan discusses what happens to inheritances in family law matters.

Transcript

My name is Bruce Provan, I’m the Managing Director of Page Provan, Family and Fertility Lawyers. We’re a firm of lawyers in central Brisbane that practice exclusively in Family and Fertility Law.

I want to talk to you today about how inheritances are treated in a property settlement and that can either be a property settlement between a married couple or between de facto partners, and it’s quite common that one or both of the parties to a relationship would have received an inheritance at some stage during the relationship or even after separation.

Now, how the inheritance is treated by the court varies from case to case. The inheritance can be included in the pool of property available for distribution between the couple, or it can be included in the pool property, but put in a separate category or a different pool of property.

But sometimes an inheritance just gets disregarded altogether. So particularly in case where there may be an inheritance post-separation, a court may decide to exclude that inheritance altogether. Now, if an inheritance is included in the pool, the next question is, what weight does it carry in terms of the division of property between the parties?

And the answer to that depends on a number of things. It can depend upon, firstly, the size of the inheritance. A small inheritance is unlikely to carry much, if any, weight at all.

It depends on when the inheritance is received in general, and inheritance received late in the relationship or even post-separation is going to carry considerably more weight than an inheritance that might have been received early in a long relationship and there’s been many subsequent contributions by both parties that get set off against that inheritance.

So it’s important to get advice from a lawyer at an early stage when contemplating a property settlement and we can advise you how the inheritance might be treated in your case, what weight it’s likely to carry, and how it should be dealt with in terms of the negotiations between the parties.

My name is Bruce Provan from Page Provan, Family and Fertility Lawyers.