Giving during your lifetime: planning how you pass things on

Passing on your assets is not just about the will. Giving during your lifetime is another way to organise things, earlier and more calmly, helping the people you care about when it is useful rather than afterwards. It is also a way of taking charge of a subject many prefer to put off, until the day it is settled without them.

Why give during your lifetime

There is no shortage of reasons. Helping a child settle, supporting a relative going through a hard time, putting some order in place to avoid tension later. Giving also lets you see the effect of what you pass on while you are still here, which a will never allows. Many families find that the timing matters as much as the amount: help at the right moment changes a path, while the same help twenty years later will change very little. It is often as much a family decision as a question of assets, and it gains from being explained to those it concerns rather than discovered by them.

The freedom to give has limits

You cannot give everything to anyone you like. Certain close heirs, children in particular, are protected by a share that must come to them, the reserved portion. The rest, the disposable portion, can be passed on more freely. Understanding where that line sits avoids preparing a transfer that could be challenged later. The point often surprises those who assume they can favour one of their own freely: the law leaves room, but less than people imagine, and a gift that goes beyond it can be reopened when the estate is settled. Better to know before signing than after.

What to give, and in what form

Not all gifts are alike. A sum of money, a property, company shares do not pass on with the same formalities or the same consequences. You can also give without stripping yourself entirely, keeping the use of an asset or the income it produces, which appeals particularly to those who want to help a child without weakening their own position. The choice of form is not a technicality: it determines what the recipient actually receives, what the giver keeps, and what will remain to be settled in time.

Do not forget the spouse

The spouse's position deserves particular attention, because a gift made to one person can change what will come to the other. The rights of the surviving spouse combine with those of the children, and the balance is not always the one you would expect. A transfer thought through only from the children's side sometimes leaves the spouse in an uncomfortable position, especially where the family home is involved. We look at this in our article on the surviving spouse.

When several countries come into play

For a family living abroad or holding assets in several countries, passing them on gets complicated quickly. The law that applies, where the assets are, nationality: all of it weighs on what is possible. A gift perfectly valid in one country can produce an unexpected effect in another, and mobile families often discover that gap at the worst moment. That is the subject of our article on international inheritance. The matrimonial regime matters too, which brings in the question of the marriage contract.

What is badly prepared in a hurry

Passing on assets does not sit well with haste. A gift decided in the emotion of a diagnosis or a bereavement sometimes works against the original intention. Taking stock of what you own, what you want to keep and what you want each person to receive takes a few weeks. That is little compared with the years of argument it spares people who care about one another.

Tax, without letting it decide for you

The cost of passing assets on comes up quickly in the conversation, and it matters. But it should not drive the decision on its own. Families sometimes arrange a gift that looks efficient on paper and end up with something that no longer matches what they wanted: a parent constrained in daily life, a child owning a property they can neither live in nor sell, a family balance damaged for a saving that was not worth it. The right order is to decide what you want first, then look at how best to achieve it, not the other way round.

If you are thinking about giving or organising your estate, a first conversation helps you ask the right questions before deciding, in French or English.