When Family and Law Mix

Are you getting married and have concerns about what will happen if you get divorced? This can include what happens with your assets, debts, and even alimony. It may be worth considering a prenuptial agreement to help work out some of these issues before getting married. Here are some reasons why you should consider getting a prenuptial agreement.

Save Money

As you may be aware, a divorce can be quite expensive when both people have a disagreement about how things should be decided. This can cause the legal process of a divorce to go on much longer than necessary, which will increase the costs associated with everyone's lawyers. If you have a prenuptial agreement in place to decide on many of the tough issues, you won't have to spend time making decisions on those things during the divorce process, which will cut back on the hours necessary to settle the divorce. There will not be anything to argue about, which speeds things up as well.

Agree On Your Alimony

If you are entering a marriage when one spouse has a high income, there can be a lot of disagreement when it comes to settling on alimony. Alimony is typically based on the size of the income gap between both spouses, and how long the marriage lasted. A bigger income gap and longer marriage will result in a larger alimony payment. Unfortunately, the higher income earner may not always agree with what a judge thinks is fair for alimony, which extends the legal process to try to get what the higher earner thinks is fair. A prenuptial agreement will list what you and your spouse think would be fair for alimony at the start of the marriage, and you won't have to worry about this changing if the marriage was to end. 

Decide On Premarital Assets

Do you have assets from before the marriage that you want to protect? This is frequently needed if someone has a business and wants to protect it if they were to be divorced. What will happen without a prenuptial agreement is that any growth that the business sustains after the marriage happens will need to be split between both spouses. As you can imagine, this will make owning a business very complicated, which is why many people decide to use a prenuptial agreement specifically for a business that one person owns.

Reach out to a family law attorney for more information on prenuptial agreements.