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Orange County lawyer article review: Just as a precaution, a prenuptial agreement would later prevent a hectic and costly divorce. The premarital contract will help determine how to distribute property if ever a divorce is necessary.
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Prenuptial Agreements
BREAKING UP. Rights and obligations with
prenuptial agreement.
by Jeffrey Broobin
Prenuptial Agreements (Premarital Contract) are like insurance policies. You do
the paperwork, and then hope you'll never need it. However, since half of
marriages end in
divorce within the first seven years, you may want to consider
a prenuptial agreement before you walk down the aisle and say, "I do."
Since you could later be engaged in a nasty, costly, and emotionally draining
divorce some day, you should consider a
prenuptial agreement as a precaution.
Below we have given you some information on what is in a prenuptial agreement
and whether it could be useful for you.
A prenuptial or ante nuptial agreement is a document signed by two people who
intend to be married. It describes their rights and obligations should they get
divorced. A prenuptial agreement informs the court how they want their assets
and property divided up.
Divorces become messy when parties cannot agree on the distribution of property,
such things as the house, the house, stocks, and bonds and whether one party
should pay the other alimony, now known as "maintenance" in most states. Assume
that the husband has $1,000,000 in his own name prior to the marriage. A
properly drafted prenuptial agreement can award that same $1,000,000 to him
after a
divorce, notwithstanding what he does with the money, such as purchasing
a home in joint tenancy or shifting the money into other accounts. Without a
prenuptial agreement, the wife might be entitled to one-half of the $1,000,000
or more, depending on the financial circumstances of the parties at the time of
the divorce. The
prenuptial agreement is a powerful and valuable tool that can
favor the husband, protect the wife, or serve both of them fairly. It is a
question of circumstances and intentions.
Candidates for
prenuptial agreements used to be just older individuals with huge
estates that they wanted to protect from gold diggers for their children from
previous marriages. Since more millionaires are born every day, the candidate
pool is growing by leaps and bounds. Now everybody has something to protect: an
unpublished author, the budding inventor, anybody with a lucrative profession or
a good idea. So, before you dismiss the idea of a prenuptial agreement, assess
your situation in life and your long-term future in deciding whether a
prenuptial agreement is right for you.
Consider at length the nature and extent of your present and possible future
assets. A
prenuptial agreement
can be a very simple document running only a few
pages that segregates each party's assets owned before the marriage, or it can
be a very complicated document that runs dozens of pages because it deals with
income and assets acquired during the marriage, the payment of debts, attorneys'
fees, alimony/maintenance, and other financial matters. The next hurdle is
raising the issue with your intended spouse, a very unromantic event. It helps
to get it over with early. Perhaps you could blame it on someone else, such as
your parents who may want to involve you in a family business, or possible
business partners.
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If you have no one to hold responsible, just be honest. Tell your future spouse
that you intend to be open, fair, and honest, and the fact that you will be
revealing all your assets is a sign of trust. Assure your intended that he or
she will be protected during the negotiation procedure and in the prenuptial
agreement, and stress that the document is something you feel is necessary and
wise before you get married. The most important thing is to discuss it earlier
instead of later, so that the degree of pressure before the wedding is
mitigated.
Couples do not usually break engagements because of disputes over
prenuptial
agreements. In almost every instance, the agreement is signed and the parties
are married. It is also completely appropriate to state that you will not get
married without a prenuptial agreement; case law has indicated that this will
not invalidate an agreement if made before the wedding.
The best way to avoid charges of duress or coercion is to tell your future
spouse early on that you want the
prenuptial agreement. Sometimes, such
documents are signed shortly before the wedding, but have been the subject of
negotiation for months. A well-drafted agreement will recite the fact that, even
though it was signed shortly before or on the wedding date, negotiations began
much earlier. It is for clauses like this that you consult experts.
Eventually, a
prenuptial agreement will be fashioned so that you and your future
spouse both accept it. The terms may not be what you initially envisioned and
may not be what your intended would want. But that is the nature of compromise.
Note that Legal Helper Corp. provides an easy-to-use, quick, and economical
online method for creating
Prenuptial Agreement (Premarital). - http://www.legalhelpmate.com/prenuptial-agreement.aspx
Jeffrey Broobin is a free-lance writer on family and finance issues; his main
goal is to help people during their complicated period of life.
Website: Legal Helper Corp.
Email: jeffreyb@legalhelper.ws
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