A marriage from before 2018

A marriage entered into before 1 January 2018 had the full community of property as its starting point, unless there was a marital property agreement or an exclusion clause. You do not apply the rules of 2018 to that older marriage because those rules are newer and better known. The date of the marriage is the first fact. If that date is before 2018, the full community is the starting point until a deed shows something else. In the file you write the date and the source, such as a marriage booklet or an extract. Ervazo does not recalculate as if every marriage falls under Article 1:94 in its new form.

In the full community, assets and debts in principle fell into the community, including what someone already had before the marriage. An inheritance or a gift fell in as well, unless an exclusion clause kept it outside the community. You have to read that clause. You may not assume that an inheritance stayed private because that is so for marriages after 2017. In the file of an older marriage you therefore do not automatically put private against an inherited asset. You put the starting point as full community, and beside it the clause if there is one. If the clause is missing from the papers, the question stays open instead of being filled in with the new law.

Marital property agreements from before 2018 may have agreed all sorts of things. Complete separation of property, a limited community or another division stands in that deed, not in the statute of 2018. Read the deed or note that it has not yet been found. Where the deed is kept and the date it was executed belong in the file, even if you have not yet copied the contents. A memory that they once went to the notary is not an agreement. Until the deed is there, the old starting point remains, with an open question beside it, not a mixture of both systems.

Anyone administering an estate therefore first asks when these people married. The rules of the limited community from 2018 do not belong in a file for a marriage from 1998 or from 2010, unless a deed itself chose those rules. You let the deed make that choice. Ervazo does not turn the date into a new regime and makes no deed.