Anybody Have A Pre-Nuptial?

I've been dating a lot recently, and one thing I make clear with a woman I'm even halfway serious about is if we ever tie the big knot, I want a pre-nuptial agreement.

Now, I'm not a rich guy by any stretch of the imagination, but after years of hard work and living cheaply (my car is over 30 years old for crying out loud), I managed to buy a beautiful home in an upscale neighborhood.

I worked two jobs for 9 years, and believe me I really hated one of my jobs. But, I forced myself to go to work year after year, and as far as I'm concerned since none of the women I've gone out with has put a penny into my mortgage, and none of them has more material wealth than me, what's mine is mine.

Now, they say if you really loved me, you wouldn't demand a pre-nuptial. To which I reply, "Honey, I know you're not a gold-digger, so why should you care?"

Needless to say, nothing fails to **** women off like a discussion like this. Also needless to say, I'm still far from being married. Which is o.k. with me, because the last thing I want to be is a meal ticket for life.

Now, I don't know a single guy who has a pre-nuptial agreement with his wife. Do you? Also, I'm wondering how well these things really work. I remember reading in the news about a professional baseball player who had his wife sign a pre-nuptial. When they decided to get a divorce, her lawyers pleaded something like because she was from another country she didn't understand the document she was signing, therefore it was null and void. The judge agreed with her, and now the ballplayer has to pay up!

To an average guy like me, losing my home to a woman who lives off 1/2 my salary while I live in my car and is banging another guy in my house is intolerable. And let me tell you, I work with two guy who are living that nightmare right now. Yes, they really do live in their cars.

So, to sum up:

1) Did you get your wife to sign a pre-nuptial agreement? Did
you try and were refused? If you were sucessful, how did you
convince your wife to sign it?

2) If you and your wife did have a pre-nuptial agreement and later
became divorced, did it help you?

3) Anyone ever sucessfully have their wives sign a post-nuptial?

I'm hoping there are a few guys with big balls out there that were able to pull off pre-nuptials, but I'm thinking most of us guys, when it comes down to it, just cave and get married. Goodbye nice house, hello 18 years of child support and alimony.

You've got to love our legal system.

Bruise

no pre-nup here, but I think it would be interesting to hear from someone who had one and divorced to see if it actually worked.

-Jason

Oh Boy! I can hardly wait to see where this thread goes! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I personally am not married, but am seriously considering it as well. The fact of the matter is that most court decisions favour the woman. It's unfortunate as it is meant to protect them and children, but often sacrifices equal application to do it. Sorry that I can't answer your question, but consider this a vote of support.

I read the Nolo press self help law book on prenups and on divorce in Californian law. I highly recommend that you read it. Here are some pointers and yes I'm married.

1. In California, theoretically, what you had before you were married is yours. JUST DOCUMENT IT< ESPECIALLY THE MONEY IN THE BANKS AS BEING EARNED BEFORE MARRIAGE> Never let her get her name on any of your pre marriage money. Maybe open a money market in Vanguard's mutual fund company in your name alone with only checkwriting and no electronic cards attached to the accounts.

2. Never restrain your wife from working. Don't hinder her carreer unless she's screwing her boss or coworker in which case just get a divorce which is allowed even by the bible for such a case. If you hinder her career she can sue you for damages upon divorce.

3. If you can do without the kids get a vasectomy. Kids are one of the major sources of headaches both in the marriage and upon divorce. I think I saw that you were from the LA area on your webpost? I am myself. And I got my vasectomy at the Greater Genito Urinary clinic in Long Beach by a doctor Schuer or Schueller I forget how to spell it. He was a nice Jewish doctor. It was done to me about 8 years ago. He used microsurgery, so no scalpel. He used local and intravenous anesthetics. Pre op, surgery, post op all cost me a sum total of $150 cash. That's it, and it was all done on the up and up. I highly recommend him. My Jewish deceased uncle used to tell a joke that in marriage there were 3 phases: 1.lots of sex. 2.sex only when the kids are away 3.no more sex.
Stay in phase one and get a vasectomy. Plus you wont have child support headaches if she cheats on you and you get divorced.

4. If you have a lot of money, the lawyers and corrupt judges will try an steal your money even if you could prove it was yours before marriage and there was a prenup and you didn't hinder her ability to get a job etc. The reason is that America no longer is the same country it was before the 1950's. The heroin addicted and morally devoid generations that grew up out of the hippie and post hippie cultures are now the attorneys and judges and politicians of today. There are no moral absolutes and neither is there really such a concept of truth according to them. That also means there really is no law that you can rest upon for safety because there is no absolute even in law to them. The only thing that matters is how much cash they can ripp you off of. They are like the crack addict gang member who lives in an apartment building. The landlord knows he has got a dangerous tenant to deal with. Usually this tenant is rent control wise and knows how to play the system against his landlord. To collect rent sometimes such a landlord has to resort to broken kneecaps or bruised bodies. Courts etc matters not at all. Such a person only responds to brute force. That's why organized crime is better suited to own the apartment buildings in such areas with such tenants. They get the job done and the govenment doesn't mess with them because the government is on the take from the criminals. And they can break the kneecaps and the tenant realizes it and pays up the rent. I'm talking about crack and heroin addicts and gang members in downtown.

And the judges and politicians and lawyers in America are very similar to the crack addict tenant above in a couple respects:

1. They are morally devoid slime who only respect brute force. They no longer care about right or wrong. If you want to have the law fairly applied to you so you can be safe from unfair frivolous corrupt divorce claims, you pretty much need to be a connected organized crime figure as in the apartment example.

2. They only respect brute force or money or pleasure. They do not get off on serving the public or doing good or administerring justice.


Good luck in your marriage.

My only knowledge is from someone I know personally. He has mucho money and got married about 6 months ago. He did the pre-nup and the only interesting thing I heard about was his lawyer told him to have his bride get a lawyer to represent her and review the agreement before signing. He told me she picked the lawyer yourself, best one in town and of course he got to pay for it. The attorney thought it would hold up better if she had representation. It took an extra month to reach an agreement but it should hold up.

I wish I would have had to sign a pre-nup when I got married. Maybe I wouldn't be so poor now.

CAUTION: No pre-nup for me, so take my "suggestions" with a very large grain of salt.

1) "...they say if you really loved me, you wouldn't demand a pre-nuptial..."

The answer to that could be something like: "If you really loved me , you would sign the pre-nuptial, for you know we will be together forever, so the pre-nuptial will never apply. Don't you think so, honey?"

2) "...one thing I make clear with a woman I'm even halfway serious about is if we ever tie the big knot, I want a pre-nuptial agreement..."

I don't know you or all the circumstances, but umm, perhaps approaching the subject of pre-nuptials at the "halfway serious" point is too early?

3) Find a really good attorney with lots of experience in this area (not an easy task, seriously!). If done right, I would think that most if not all of your assets can be protected. (If I recall correctly, Marla, the ex-Mrs. Donald Trump supposedly got away with a "minimal" amount in her divorce because of the pre-nup she signed. Yes, I know, The Donald is from another state, and probably paid his attorneys obscene amounts of money...but it gives hope.)

4) Keep looking, you haven't found "The One" yet.

Sorry, I'm not answering your specific questions, but I found this topic too intriguing to pass up... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon23.gif

If you feel you need one then you should not be getting married. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I'm going to stick my neck out here and say prenups are a bad Idea. You are planing your divorce. If your not ready to commit 100% for the rest of your life, your not ready to get married. Wait till you find the right woman, then put it all on the line. Anything less is asking for a failed marriage. Otherwise just live together, it'll be easier when it's time to part ways.
Patrick Hayes

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Patrick Hayes said:
I'm going to stick my neck out here and say prenups are a bad Idea. You are planing your divorce.

[/ QUOTE ]

While in some cases this might be true, there are certainly situations where a pre-nup (or even a post-nup) makes good sense for both parties. For example, if you are in a community property state, it might be advisable to execute a pre-nup to "divide your assets" so that an adverse judgement in a lawsuit against one of you doesn't drain all the family assets. So in that case you would not be "planning your divorce" but rather, you would simply be "planning", which is always a good idea. An estate lawyer should be able to explain the pros and cons of these types of agreements.

John

My pre-nup is entirely verbal, my wife told me I better do what she says or else... As long as she can continue to support me in the manner to which I have become accustomed I will probably continue to do so /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

"You are planing your divorce."

I have car insurance. Am I planning on having an accident? How about health insurance? Am I planning on getting cancer? No. This is just being prepared with the hope that I'll never need to use them.

If you feel the need for a prenup, I think the subject should be broached early on in the relationship. Failure to communicate is the primary reason for relationship failures. If they disagree with a prenup, and not having a prenup is a "show-stopper", then it's time to bail out.

My wife and I laid all the cards on the table while we were dating. We know ALL of each other's history and don't have any problems with it. We know how we each feel about all different very personal subjects and we are comfortable with that knowledge. We keep no secrets.

If the person you are getting serious with won't discuss the subjects you want to discuss, or can't respect your point of view, you're not in a good relationship and should get out of it. Otherwise everything will come to a head AFTER you get married and you'll wish you had that prenup that they refused to sign.

BTW, we don't have a prenup. We both came into the relationship with very little, and what we do have has been almost entirely a collective effort to obtain.

The sad fact today is that 50% of marriages end in divorce. With that statistics like that, it's only prudent to consider one.

I was "poor" (and still am) before I got married. For me a pre-nup would've been pretty silly. She could have half my clothes, half my nearly dead car and half of my kitchen gear if she really wanted it. Alimony--who are we kidding! I didn't have enought to support me, that's why I had to get married.

Now is a different story. We've already purchased things together and it would be difficult to split them up.
If I would have had as much as I do now, before I met my wife, yes, I would have considered getting a pre-nup.

-Jason

Love is grand... divorce is a couple hundred grand.

I tried to get a prenup, but predictably my wife (then fiancee) would hear none of it. I didn't get one. It wasn't so much that I had a lot of assets to protect, but just wanted to avoid an expensive legal battle. What's the point of fighting over $100K of marital assets and winding up with $20K each and $60K to the attorneys? BTW, I also buckle my seatbelt before driving even when I don't intend to get into an accident.

The thing is that most women (pardon the generalization here) are going to look at getting married a lot more emotionally that most men. Talking prenup really kills the romance for them. I think it is a good idea to toss the idea out there very early in the relationship and make it non-negotiable. I don't think you can wait until you propose marriage and in the same breath bring up the prenup. Unless you are a millionaire with a clear need for one and can sell that to the bride.

The only guy I know who has one is an attorney on his second marriage. He got burned the first time.

Given the divorce rate and the legal/time cost of divorce, a prenup is not only a good idea, but should be mandatory for every marriage no matter what the circumstances.

However, depending on your state, there might be some things you can do to protect your assets without a prenup, so look into that prior to getting married. Generally speaking, anything you have before the marriage or receive as a gift or inheritance after marriage is yours alone if you do not co-mingle it with marital assets. Keep it separate and keep good records. You can't even funnel the money temporarily through a joint account. The marital assets are anything you earn during the marriage and anything you co-mingle with marital assets. These are up for grabs. Your home will probably become a marital asset since you will be making payments on it or improvements to it with marital assets. You could mortgage it to the hilt before getting married and the cash could be preserved as a non-marital asset. I think there is also special treatment of retirement accounts, but I do not recall the details. This is my unprofessional understanding of how it works in NC and there may be similarities in other states.

During divorce the Judge decides based on "equity" how to divide the marital assets. His notion of "equity" can be based in part on your non-marital assets. He can give all marital assets to your wife and award a generous alimony if he wants to. But at least you would be left with your non-marital assets, which are going to come in handy because you would otherwise be broke at this point.

One advantage of this plan is that you do not have to disclose your non-marital assets to your wife. If you get a prenup, disclosure is mandatory and failure will invalidate the prenup.

There is an interesting property of love, and that's vulnerability. One can make arrangements for a union with a partner based on convenience. That isn't a demonstration of love. One can make it legal through marriage for moral reasons or religious beliefs. That isn't a demonstration of love. One can recognize the legal complexities of such an arrangement, and set up additional legal agreements, sometimes binding and sometimes flawed. In any case, should the agreement become necessary to call into consideration by courts, the agreement is limited in the protection offered whether it's a pre-nup, a labor agreement, a contract or whatever. The one with property to attach or lose will always be vulnerable to whatever decisions a court will make. A court might consider the agreement in it's final decision on what's fair, but such agreement will not totally protect one that has defrauded, cheated or injured an innocent party. If one trusts the other to only pursue a non-accusatory charge, should separation come, then one is blinded by false hopes also. All the tricks in the book will not negate the vulnerability inherent in love.

My wife of 36 years could, if she wished, totally devastate my world. She could have even after we were married only six months, but didn't. She could have even more after 25 years, but didn't. It might seem that the trust increases with time, and short of reaching the point of unreasonably taking her for granted, it does. The balance is in increased vulnerability. Each moment I love, and each moment that she loves, our vulnerability increases, even though our trust grows. There is no escape from it. When you love you MAKE yourself vulnerable.

The questions I asked of myself in my youth, "will she still love me when I'm an old man" is nearer answered. The changes as I grow older grows more evident, since I'll be sixty in a couple of months. She's really amazing to stand by me even after she has found how flawed a creature I am. Of course she has gone through some changes too, and if I search her face I'm can see that time affects even her; but it takes a deliberate effort to notice. It takes special effort to see her as other than the same young girl I married. I suspect she's the same regarding me.

A pre-nup wasn't considered when we started. I wonder; would such excess baggage have been too much? Has placing ourselves into such a vulnerable position from the time we committed ourselves to each other without reservation been fruitful? They're rhetorical questions, of course. Who can say?

Just speaking from a financially advantageous point-of-view, there are some legal protections in the arrangement of property. It's to protect yourself from outside the marriage though, and not within. In fact, I don't even know a way to reconcile it to a pre-nup. Are you in a position of legal risk from lawsuits? Are you in the medical field, or a profession often challenged as liable? Are you a supervisor that could later or even now risk a claim of harassment? If so, it could be advantageous to put all of your assets in your spouse's name. The one with something to lose is the one at risk. That would sure play havoc with a pre-nup though.

My best defence has been having nothing of value that my wife would ever be interested in. Including money. FINALLY this is working out in my favor!

Quite seriously - my life has changed so much since my wife and I have been together that no pre-nup would have ever managed to cover all the eventualities that I didn't even CONSIDER to be possibilities way back then.

Interesting discussion.

Money is nice but the 2 most precious things to both of us are "Ours". Their names are Anna and Hugh. How can you cover that?

Anna had a perfomance at school today - no parents invited. She did it at home for us yesterday. The "Chicken Dance" - VERY cute. Picture a whole class of 5 and 6 YOs pretending to be a flock of dancing chickens

People, I posted this topic simultaneously on another website www.bladeforums.com . The interesting thing there is most of the members there, male and female alike, had very negative feelings towards pre-nuptials. Go to the Community Center there to read some very interesting, very different, opinions.

Bruise

BruiseLee,

You shouldn't be getting married unless you're sure you will never need a prenup. By the time you marry someone, you should know her well enough to know that she is the type of person who could never do something like that, even out of bitterness. The only real trick to being successful at that is to make sure you can rationally see through the fog of love and see what she is really like.

On the other hand, if you do get married and decide you would like to be on the safe side, here is some good advice I heard from a friend, who read it in Maxim magazine. Just drop it in conversation something like this: "I was talking to my lawyer about xxx and he suggested very strongly that I get a prenup, that everyone should." That way, it doesn't come across as your idea and your potential distrust, and it shouldn't make her so mad.

If I were going to do it, the subject would somehow come up accidentally, at which point you would carefully state your opinion on the matter.

If you look at it from your partner's woman's point of view, you could probably see how it would hurt a bit.

Of course, it is also a good idea to put the feelers out, like you did with this post...

[ QUOTE ]
Smaug said:
Just drop it in conversation something like this: "I was talking to my lawyer about xxx and he suggested very strongly that I get a prenup, that everyone should." That way, it doesn't come across as your idea and your potential distrust, and it shouldn't make her so mad.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not so sure that manipulation is proper. Selecting one's mate is not, nor should it be a PC consideration. If one prefers and searches for a blond, brunette, slim or heavy, protestant, Catholic, green eyed, a particular political affiliation, a particular race or complexion, fun-loving, serious minded, a mole on the left hip or whatever, it's purely a matter of taste. If BruiseLee seeks someone that shares his opinion of pre-nuptial agreements then by all means thats what he should seek. But, attempting to find ways to influence a prospective mate to "settle" for something outside of their search is disrespectful of the same consideration.