Notaries point out that this solution, often overlooked, helps prepare your estate while drastically reducing your tax bill.
Inheritance tax is often a headache. Scales, reductions, deadlines, calculations… Many families discover too late the extent of the costs to pay when inheriting. And the amounts are far from symbolic: in France, they can easily reach several tens of thousands of euros, even for modest assets. Result: many parents are looking for the right way to pass on their assets to their children without the tax authorities taking the biggest share.
Faced with these concerns, notaries point out that there is a simple, legal and particularly advantageous system. It allows you to prepare your inheritance during your lifetime, avoid double taxation and, in many cases, transfer real estate without paying too much tax. This mechanism is based on a clever principle: we do not give everything at once, but only part of the good, while continuing to benefit from it. A discreet strategy, used for a long time in the best prepared family transfers.
This system is the donation of bare ownership. Concretely, parents give bare ownership of the accommodation to their children, but retain the usufruct: that is to say, they can continue to live there or collect the rent until their death. The interest is fiscal: the value transmitted is not that of the total property, but only that of the bare ownership, calculated according to the age of the donors. At 70 years old, it represents 60% of the value of the property; at 80 years old, 70%. Let’s take the example of a 68-year-old couple who own an apartment estimated at 400,000 euros. By giving bare ownership to their only son, they transmit a value of 280,000 euros, or 70% of the property. Each parent benefits from a reduction of 100,000 euros, which means that 200,000 euros are completely exempt from tax. The duties to be paid therefore only concern 80,000 euros, which corresponds to approximately 6,400 euros in total. A considerable saving compared to a traditional donation, while continuing to collect the rent from the property.
On the death of the parents, the usufruct ends automatically and the children become full owners, without additional costs or taxes. Everything has already been settled. This is why notaries present bare ownership as the most effective legal way to organize your estate, protect your children and reduce your tax bill. A simple way to anticipate, without dispossessing yourself.
