Does the inheritance I receive also belong to my spouse?

Question

José Manuel Alburquerque · Accepted Answer

No. If your marriage is governed by Catalan law and you did not agree on a different regime before a notary, it is under separation of property. What you inherit is yours alone, as is anything it produces. If your marriage is under the “sociedad de gananciales”, the community-property regime, what you inherit is also yours alone, but any rent or interest it produces belongs to both of you. What can make part of it end up belonging to your spouse is mixing it with joint money or putting it in both your names. Under separation of property What you inherit is yours and you can sell it without your spouse's permission. The exception, under any regime, is the family home. Even if it is yours alone, you need your spouse's consent or the court's authorisation to sell or mortgage it. If you divorce, what you inherited is not divided. If it is the family home, the court can award its use to your spouse. What you inherit does not count when calculating the compensation for work in the home that is sometimes owed to the other spouse. What you have saved from its rent or interest does count. Under the community-property regime What you inherit is yours, but what it produces during the marriage, such as rent or interest, belongs to both of you. If an inheritance is left to both spouses together, without saying which share belongs to each, it becomes joint property, unless the will says otherwise. The law presumes that the spouses' assets are joint property. Keep the inheritance papers so that you can prove that what you inherited is yours. Take care when mixing If you pay the inherited money into an account in both your names, it may later be difficult to prove that it was yours alone. If you use that money to buy a flat in both your names, under separation of property you are presumed to have given half of it to your spouse. Under the community-property regime no gift is presumed. When the joint assets are divided, you can ask to be repaid what you contributed. If you want to keep it as your own, hold it in an account in your name only and, when buying, have the deed state where the money comes from. Which regime you have depends on the “vecindad civil”, the regional civil-law status, of both spouses when they married, unless they agreed on another one before a notary. If their statuses differed, the usual test is where they lived together immediately after the wedding. Many married couples living in Catalonia are under the community-property regime because when they married they had the civil-law status of another region, such as Madrid or Andalucía. Living here afterwards does not change it. If one of the two is a foreign national, the rules are different.