is there anyone else who doesn't believe in prenups?

agree. however, it's neither smart nor prudent to do so.

I agree with what you're saying, but I also think my perspective might be different if I were worth $100 million.

yeah, could be except I think that the people that are doing prenups (at least in the article) aren't worth that muchbut yeah I see what you mean, if you are worth $100 million when you meet someone it would be hard to know for sure why they fell in love with you

Juiced Up wrote:

I agree with what you're saying, but I also think my perspective might be different if I were worth $100 million.

anEconomist wrote:

but yeah I see what you mean, if you are worth $100 million when you meet someone it would be hard to know for sure why they fell in love with you

I also don't think it's right for someone to make an enormous profit from a divorce. If a person is worth $100 million and they marry someone with nothing and they get a divorce, it doesn't seem right to me that the person with nothing gets $50 million or anything close to that amount. I believe they should get enough money to live comfortbly, especially if there are kids involved, but tens of millions doesn't seem fair to me.

get govt out of the marriage business. marriage is a religious sacrament with no business being a govt function.

the marriage bureaucracy costs taxpayers hundreds of millions per year. each and every name change, document filing, paper copies, offices, personnel etc...

if people chose to spend a life together and want some kind of legal arrangement then let them pay for it themselves.

my wife and i consider our church wedding to be our 'marriage', not the fact that we then had to drive to a govt office (paid for with our tax $$) and have a govt bureaucrat fill out some paperwork.

I'm an idealist, too, on the topic. When my wife and I married we basically had negative net worth due to student loans, so no biggie. It does seem like a "when we get divorced" amendment to the marriage license.

On the other hand, I can see times it makes sense. I know someone who is right now inheriting a sustantial amount of money and property. She married for the first time last year, at 40-something, and I would be very surprised if she did NOT have a pre-nup. And now that her mom has passed, she's watching her mom's long-time companion pull some crazy $hit. He's well provided for in the will, but wants the whole farm (literally, a horse ranch). She's also watching her brother-in-law dream up ways to throw away his family's part of the inheritance. The ass is acting like he's won the lottery. Given what she is seeing, what she is now worth, and the fact that her husband was poor as dirt when they met, I'd bet a pre-nup would actually provide a bit of peace of mind for her.

The one thing that prenups can do is save money in court costs and keep the courts from getting clogged with divorse precedings. Even if it is a deal for an even split it could cut down on some time and costs. Also some prenups will still be challenged but it wouldn't be the long process that some divorse hearings take now.

As much as everyone wants to think they are the exception to the rule, about half of all mariages end in divorse and this costs the courts lots of time and money.

I know one guy that got a prenup because he is 50% owner of a small corporation and if he got divorced that could effect ownership and control of the corporation, and potentially screw over his business partner.

I think there is a considerable amount of difference between young couples who get married with "nothing" - a category I fit into - and couples that get married (typically later in life) with considerable assets. While I concur with the spirit of "marriage is for life", the reality is that some people find themselves in a situation where it is simply not possible to stay together, and where there are considerable assets at hand, a pre-nup makes sense. The most essential element (to me) in a pre-nup would be to make certain that I could look out after my own children from the first marriage - those loyalties run pretty deep and a driving motivation for many of us is not just to make money to get "things", but to be able to give our kids at least some sense of security or a better start in life. Hence, a pre-nup in that situation, and in the small business situation, makes a lot of sense to me. Not an easy thing to raise, however, with a prospective spouse.

i agree with your post. big difference first marriage at 25 yr old and second marriage with 3 children at 45 years old and $800,000 in assets--which is only half of what i got from my divorce.

i should protect my children if i were to marry again. also would not want the new spouse to be put into an adversarial relationship with my children. she should be protected, but not awarded half of my assets if we were to divorce.

i think about this question very differently after having attended law school. although there are significant differences, i think of a prenup as similar to a will. the state provides certain laws regarding a division of assets upon divorce, just as it does for a distribution of assets upon death. in most cases, a will simply puts into writing what the state would provide if you died without a will (usually something like everything goes to a surviving spouse; if no surviving spouse then everything goes to surviving kids in equal portions, etc.).

in either case, if you actually have, or think you might acquire, a meaningful amount of assets, you probably want to have input about the division/distribution beyond what the legislature/governor have provided.

again, i recognize that death is certain while divorce is unlikely (for educated, upper middle class folks in a first marriage it is less than 50%). however, divorce is much more likely to be acrimonious and most importantly the laws for the distribution of marital assets vary widely from state to state. if i knew how to put text in bold i would put that last clause in bold. it is extremely important and can lead to absurd results.

i am not married, and if i do get married it's likely that my spouse will come into the marriage with a greater amount of pre-marital assets. in any event, i believe in the concept of sharing marital assets equally in the unfortunate event of divorce. nevertheless, i think that a basic pre-nup makes sense given the legal morass that you can find yourself in if you have lived in multiple states during your marriage. it might be as simple as after 5 years of marriage every penny is divided equally, no matter its origin. or it might carve out an inheritance if one or both of you stand to receive a large one. or it might carve out a business interest in some way.

fair enough... do you think it is a good or bad that law school has changed the way you view things that affect items such as marriage?

The problem is that "whatever they get" is quite often far, far more than they deserve. Who is to say your (hypothetically) divorcing wife (I'm assuming you are male) won't find a judge who will grant her 70% or 80% What if you had that money going in? What if you had millions and married someone who divorced you a year later and managed to get half your money. What if she married you just for your money and it turned out she had cheated on you. Would you still think the spouse deserves whatever she gets? There are cases where she can get quite a lot.

I don't see how that necessarily follows. I think it all depends on what marriage means to you

I think there are a lot of people out there who would like to believe in the fairy tale but are afraid. I don't mean to denigrate it by calling it a "fairy tale" because I think that for some people it can come true. But the fact remains that for many it does not.

Marriage is taking a big chance. For every couple that KNOWS they are meant to be together, there are 3 or 4 that are not sure. Sometimes even the ones who are certain learn that they were wrong. But if they are right, they don't want to wait until they are too old to have children to find that out so they are taking a chance.

There are quite often seriously unequal partners, financially speaking, going into these marriages. They are smart enough to recognize they are taking a chance and so they write out a contract so that some automatic state law can't strip one of them of a lot of money.

The fact is, if there were no need for prenuptial agreements, they would not exist. If there were not a whole lot of rich people who got burned badly by taking that chance, no lawyer would ever have dreamed up the idea.

I would be surprised if prenups have not actually prevented a number of bad marriages from occuring before the fact.

It depends on whether you want a business arrangement or a marriage.

anEconomist wrote:

you married FOR life - that means you both are entitled to whatever the other has

There are tons of guys who once thought as you do who are now living in a basement cooking dinner on a hotplate.

If you think talking about a prenup with a fiancee is difficult you have no idea what's in store for you in the event you get divorced without one.

anEconomist wrote:

fair enough... do you think it is a good or bad that law school has changed the way you view things that affect items such as marriage?

i think it is a good thing. i have more knowledge now about property distribution under the laws of various states. that is worthwhile practical knowledge. i also know more about federal tax law and the way that it can have a big financial impact on the marriage decision. having that knowledge is also a good thing. i can still choose whether the legal situation will impact my personal life choices. i'm just more informed than the average, say, 23 year old right out of college.

if your question is an idealistic one, that i will attempt to rephrase as "do you wish that the legal system did not have a mixture of marriage incentives and disincentives to influence your decision to get married or not?" or "do you wish the decision to marry would be one made solely on the basis of love and romantic ideals?", i think my answer is no. co-opting the rhetoric of the anti-gay marriage folks, marriage is a fundamental social institution and it's important for government to consider ways to ensure fairness to all parties, including children, involved in a marital relationship. such laws will necessarily include dis/incentives to marry to varying degrees. and as long as you have a federal system, such laws will create odd effects for those who live in multiple states during their marriage.

again, i think default rules (for both wills and divorces) are fine for the large majority of people and situations. but for some people and situations, opting out of the default state rules makes sense.

keep in mind also that "post-nups" are becoming more common. these allow you to consider allocation of items like a large inheritance or business windfall when they occur. i would imagine in some cases they precede divorce by only a few months. in others, i would imagine that they take a lot of pressure off of the couple, especially for a middle class family that comes into a large sum via such a windfall.

kaitainen wrote:

(for educated, upper middle class folks in a first marriage it is less than 50%)

(for educated, upper middle class folks in a first marriage it is [much] less than 50%)

Athough I hate the concept of pre-nups it was THE BEST THING I ever did.

My second marriage was to a younger woman with very little money. I own a small corporation with about 80 employees.

Sadly, she cheated on me, dumped me and we got a divorce. I would have lost my business and my long time employees would have lost their jobs without the pre-nup.

I never thought I would need it, sad I had to use it but there are certain times and situations they are a big time lifesaver. I would have lost so much and ended like the other poster said in a crappy apartment cooking on a hot plate.

[quote]Average_Joe wrote:

The problem is that "whatever they get" is quite often far,far more than they deserve. Who is to say your (hypothetically) divorcing wife (I'm assuming you are male) won't find a judge who will grant her 70% or 80% What if you had that money going in? What if you had "millions and married someone who divorced you a year later and managed to get half your money. What if she married you just for your money and it turned out she had cheated on you. Would you still think the spouse deserves whatever she gets? There are cases where she can get quite a lot.[quote]

I have never seen a split beyond 50%, except in cases where one spouse was wasting assets (had a gambling problem, drug problem, expensive chick on the side problem). In MA, you don't start talking 50/50 until there's a long term marriage, 15-20 years or more. The shorter the marriage, the smaller the %. Pretty rational when you think about it. Anyone divorcing after one year is not going to be walking away rich. Not saying it can't happen elsewhere, but it doesn't happen here.

I guess if I had to consider using a prenup, I probably wouldn't be asking the person to marry me in the first place.