Below are our posts regarding the practice of getting a prenuptial agreement.
Are Prenups Pernicious?
W. Bradford Wilcox is against prenuptial agreements:
My research suggests that couples who embrace a generous orientation toward their marriage, as well as those who take a dim view of divorce, are significantly more likely to be happy in their marriages. A National Center for Family and Marriage Research study finds that couples who share joint bank accounts are less likely to get divorced. In fact, married couples who do not pool their income are 145 percent more likely to end up in divorce court, compared to couples who share a bank account.
So, the kind of partners who wish to hold something back from their spouse in a marriage — emotionally, practically and financially — and to look out for No. 1 instead are more likely to end up unhappy and divorced. If that is your aim in marrying, go ahead and get a prenup.
Erik W. Newton, on the other hand, argues that every “married couple has a prenup, whether they want one or not” because the “laws covering marriage and divorce in every state are nothing more and nothing less than premarital agreements”:
For the majority of couples, a state’s default prenup is perfectly sufficient. It has been crafted over hundreds of years both through common law and common sense. That said, a couple can’t know if it works for them unless they take the time to explore the law. We enter into a nuptial contract when we say “I do” but not very many of us know the exact terms of it.
A couple should use the existence of a “state prenup” to discuss finances before getting married. Challenging topics will inevitably arise during a marriage. Many of these topics are addressed in the law, but some might be more delicately handled with a customized prenup.
A reader writes:
You will probably get a flood of emails on this issue. I speak from experience on this. In my first marriage I had no prenup. It was a brief marriage of a couple of years between two naive fools with almost no money. Both my wife and I had a combined income at the time (early ’90s) of about $25k. But in the divorce judgment (in a “no-fault” divorce state) I got creamed, forced to cough up $500/month in alimony to a working woman with more education that I had, for no discernible reason other than the fact that I was a man. I could barely pay my rent and eat for a period of time, until she married another guy.
In my current marriage I insisted on a prenup. People were perplexed because my current wife earns far more money than I do. Why would I need protection when she has more than I? They also presumed that prenup’s are for the very wealthy – millionaires who don’t want to lose half the fortunes they earned before getting married. But I always make a couple of points to the naysayers: 1) Never presume a divorce judge is going to be fair or rational – as was made clearly evident in my divorce. 2) When you enter divorce proceeding without a prenup, you risk all of your future earnings. That means a percentage (or fixed amount) of your future income could be claimed by someone else for the rest of your life. This is where the assumption that prenups are for “rich people” falls apart. If a movie star earning millions per year has to give up half of that to an ex-spouse, he still has millions left over with which to live his life and save for retirement. But if someone in poverty level income brackets gets shafted and forced to pay out a large percentage of his income to an ex-spouse, it could be the tipping point to starvation or homelessness.
Prenups should not only be encouraged for younger and low-income betrothed; they should be required by law.
Chris Rock doesn’t think so:
A reader writes:
Your reader who complained about having to pay $500/month in alimony “just because he was a man” might not have told the whole story. If I’m wrong I apologize, but it may also have been because he was bailing on the marriage and the wife did not want to divorce. I suppose it depends on which state that was. I was divorced in California, and the divorce was mutually agreed by my wife and I. Part of the divorce settlement was a division of property agreement that we filled out and agreed upon together, and signed and presented as part of the petition. Since the divorce was uncontested, the mutually agreed terms were basically rubber stamped by the judge. In this case, no children were involved either. When children are involved it leads to more judicial intervention.
The case being described by your reader sounds like it was a contested divorce, not an uncontested one with mutual agreement. I may be wrong, but I think a decision like this is likely if the husband wants to divorce but the wife does not, or if the husband and wife can’t agree mutually on a property settlement. So it may have been because he was a man AND because he was unilaterally initiating a contested divorce.
Considering it this way, a prenup is like planning for divorce in advance. Going into marriage without a prenup means you are committed to making it work, unless both can agree on a settlement. I suppose couples who fear they can’t make it work or agree on a settlement, and thus need the protection of a prenup, should think twice, three, four, or more times before marrying.
Even if you don’t email the Dish, you can still add your two cents to the thread:
An emailer shares a dramatic tale of woe:
I was married when I was 24. It was a bad marriage. I tried to call the engagement off four times, but was coerced back into it each time with threats that she would kill herself if I left. She was generally this awful every day. We were married for two years, which is how long it takes for someone to call someone’s bluff on that threat. When I left, I was shocked by the state of our finances. I made about $30-35K per year. I believe she made about $75K. I had a car payment and a student loan payment. She had a car payment. Rent was reasonable. There was no reason for any credit card debt.
A few days after I left, she sent me a spreadsheet of assets and debts. Under assets, she listed things of mine like my guitars and a piano that was a gift from my best friend. However, on her side, she didn’t count things like a several thousand dollar ring as an asset. That was the beginning of the fucking-over. She also had over $30K in credit card debt that I didn’t know about. Not only that, without my knowing, she had applied for these cards in both of our names.
She proposed that all of the debt should be mine and all of the assets hers. The way she saw it, the only property I should retain was my clothes. This carried an additional threat of her family having money and mine having none, and she would therefore do everything she could do to give me all of the debt and none of the assets, to cripple me for years.
I saw a lawyer about this. She said that it would cost me at least $10-15K and a lot of stress to properly contest everything. I could barely afford my Corolla, so this was out of the question.
I then realized that the only leverage I could have would be if I left and didn’t divorce her. She wanted to wrap things up and fuck me over quickly while emotion was still involved. I told her I didn’t want to go through with the legal process and was willing to wait two years until she could file for divorce on the grounds of abandonment … unless she met in the middle on the debt that she accumulated (my lawyer said I would be held liable for half, since she put the cards in my name, unless the proceedings were to get really expensive). After a few more days of threats from her, and me not backing down, she agreed to 50% of her debt, and I would get to keep my guitars, piano and iPod. Nothing else. No wedding gifts. Nothing at all. Good enough for me.
Then I went to my lawyer. We went over my finances. This debt she threw on me, in addition to my car payment, put me in an unmanageable position, which forced me into bankruptcy. I reaffirmed the car loan, to save some semblance of a credit rating, but in order to expunge the debt that she accrued, my credit rating dropped from 780 to the cellar. Five years later, it’s finally back up, but that really fucked me over when I wanted to buy a new car or rent an apartment.
If you’re struggling to get by, a prenup can save you. But more importantly, don’t marry an awful person.
A much happier story:
My mom was 68 when my dad died. They had lived modestly in a small town (Dad owned a general merchandise store), but he had made a couple of smart investments during the depression and had held on to those investments for almost 50 years. When he died, his estate was enough that if invested frugally could help support my mom’s lifestyle – modest but comfortable.
When she remarried some 6 years later, my sister and I stayed with her the night before the wedding. As we were sitting at her table talking, she dropped two envelopes on the table which, much to our collective shock, was a prenuptial agreement! I had no idea that mom even knew what a prenup was, much less how to go about getting one and convincing her soon-to-be new husband to agree. When we asked her why, she said very simply, “Your dad and I worked hard to put money away for the two of you and I just want to make sure that if I die first that there is no question about who inherits. And my new husband agreed – for his children as well. We are combining our future income (social security) but the past is different.”
My mom had to leave high school after her freshman year, after her mom died, to take care of her dad and brother but she obviously learned a lot by living and working along side my dad for 47 years. She outlived my stepdad by 12 years and I am still in awe of how smart she was!
by Chris Bodenner
The results of our Urtak survey show that 7% of married readers have had a prenup, 24% of unmarried readers say they plan to get a prenup, and 24% say it would be a dealbreaker if their intended spouse insisted on having a prenup. Regarding the question graphed above (where orange means “no” and blue means “yes”), male and female readers were both evenly split. A reader writes:
I write in response to the reader who had to declare bankruptcy after a divorce, I don’t think a prenup would have helped his case. First, it’s not realisitic to think that a guy who couldn’t afford $10k for a divorce lawyer could afford to pay a lawyer for a prenup. Second, I’m not sure a typical prenup would include a “no getting credit cards without the consent of both parties” clause because, if you need one of those, you probably shouldn’t get married. Third, a prenup can be challenged in court, and a good divorce lawyer can find ambiguities in the prenup to drag out litigation. So he could have been faced with $10k in legal bills even with a prenup.
Another:
I have a bit of a different perspective on prenups in one niche demographic group: Orthodox Jews. You see, Orthodox Judaism is a patriarchal religion in which women have less rights – or, as it is sometimes spun by the “Modern Orthodox” wing of Orthodoxy (as opposed to the haredi, or fundamentalist, wing) – “different” rights. When it comes to divorce, an Orthodox woman cannot get a religious divorce (and therefore cannot remarry) unless her husband grants her the divorce. When a man refuses to do so, the woman is referred to as an agunah, or a “chained woman.” They can still get a civil divorce on the woman’s initiative, but not a religious divorce.
When I got married, my rabbi required me to sign a prenup that stated that in the event we get a civil divorce, I am required to grant my wife a religious divorce. Many Modern Orthodox rabbis will not perform a wedding unless such a prenup is first signed. It is impossible, in the view of Orthodoxy, to change the religious divorce requirements, but they are using the modern prenup as a way to equalize the power between men and women and ensure that women do not become chained. For an example of what happens when such a prenup is not entered into, one needs to look no further than the US Congress.
