No fixed three-month period for the choice

A persistent misunderstanding says that an heir has three months in which to choose. The choice is unconditional acceptance, acceptance under the benefit of inventory, or renunciation. There is no fixed statutory period of three months for that choice. The file should therefore contain no standard task that lets the choice lapse three months after the death. Such a date invents a period that the statute does not set. The choice stays empty until there is a declaration or described conduct.

An interested party can ask the subdistrict court judge to set a period. That is set out in art. 4:192 paragraph 2 BW. Only once that period has been set does it come into the file, with the decision as the source and with the date the subdistrict court judge states. A letter from a co-heir who picks a date themselves is not that decision. That letter can lie as correspondence with the person involved. It is not converted into a statutory expiry date.

Meanwhile, conducting oneself as an heir can indeed be unconditional acceptance. The choice therefore does not of itself wait for a form, nor does it wait for three months to pass. Taking assets away or selling them can be such conduct. The file describes the act cautiously and does not of itself turn it into acceptance. The act does remain on the timeline, so that no one later thinks there was not yet any fact because a period would still be running.

Three months do occur with a different subject. Creditors may not take recourse against the estate during the first three months. That is art. 4:185 BW. That rule is about recourse, not about the heir's choice. In the file it gets a rule of its own, counted from the death, with the debts or with the estate inventory as a whole. It does not get the label choice period. Whoever puts the two dates on one line mixes recourse and acceptance.

There is also no statutory period for winding up a whole estate. Three months is not a statutory rule for that, nor is some other round period, so long as no document sets that date. The file schedules tasks with a source, not with an invented end date for everything. Ervazo orders those dates and does not calculate by way of advice. The civil-law notary, the court or the Dutch Tax Administration (Belastingdienst) decides the specific case.