Rule 94 Disclaimers

If you want to turn down an inheritance or gift of property, you have to file what's called a disclaimer. This is a legal way of saying "I don't want this" so the property passes to someone else instead of coming to you. To do this properly, you need to follow the delivery and filing steps set out in Hawaiʻi law (HRS § 526-12).

If the deceased person's estate hasn't gone through probate yet, you still need to file your disclaimer with the court. You file it with whichever court would have handled the probate case if one had been opened. The court clerk will accept your disclaimer without needing a judge's approval, and will give it a case number. That same case number gets used later if anything else comes up involving the deceased person's estate.

If there's already a personal representative or trustee handling the estate or trust, they can file your disclaimer as part of that existing case once they receive it. This keeps all the paperwork about the deceased person's property organized in one place.