Short answer. No. A general forgiveness of your debts in a will reaches only what you already owed the testator when the will was signed. Article 937 says a generic remission covers debts existing at the time the will was executed, not debts you ran up afterwards. Those later debts remain fully collectible.
What the law says
A generic legacy of release or remission of debts comprises those existing at the time of the execution of the will, but not subsequent ones.
Civil Code, Article 937 — Generic Remission of Debts. Read the full provision →
The cut-off is the date the will was signed
Article 937 fixes a clear line in time. A generic legacy of release or remission of debts comprises those existing at the time of the execution of the will, but not subsequent ones. A generic remission is a blanket forgiveness — the testator says, in effect, "I forgive what you owe me" without listing each debt. The law reads that blanket as covering only the debts that were already alive when the will was signed. Anything you borrowed after that date falls outside the pardon, because at the moment the testator wrote it those later debts did not yet exist and so could not have been the ones he meant to forgive.
Why later debts stay collectible
A will speaks the intentions the testator had when he made it. He can only forgive what he knows about, and he cannot knowingly release a debt that has not yet come into being. So a debt you incur months or years later is treated as a fresh, separate obligation the will never touched. When the testator dies, his estate — through the executor or administrator, and ultimately his heirs — can still demand payment of those post-will debts in full. The remission does not roll forward to cover them automatically, no matter how broadly the forgiveness was phrased.
What is and isn't caught by the pardon
The rule does not shrink a valid remission of your existing debts. If you genuinely owed money at the time the will was executed, a generic release wipes that out on the testator's death, and the estate cannot chase you for it. What Article 937 refuses to do is stretch that release into the future. It also does not deal with a will that specifically names and forgives a particular debt; that is a different, targeted disposition. The article governs the blanket, unspecified kind of forgiveness, and confines it to the debts that were on the books when the pen touched the paper.
Reading the will against the timeline
Because everything turns on dates, the practical questions are when the will was executed and when each debt arose. A debt contracted before that date is presumptively forgiven; one contracted after is not. If the testator wanted to forgive future borrowings as well, the will would have to say so in terms that clearly reach beyond debts already owed — the default rule leans the other way. Where the timing of a loan is disputed, or where it is unclear whether a debt predated the will, the estate and the debtor may end up litigating exactly which obligations the generic remission swept away and which survived it.