F I N AN CE
PRENUPTIALS
MAY SAVE YOUR HEIRS
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Get the stars out of your eyes. For men, a marriage is as
much a financial contract as it is a romantic one.
Love is beautiful, but you can’t let emotions cause you
to ignore statistics about divorce rates. Nor should your
feelings prevent you from protecting the assets you’ll be
bringing into the marriage – especially if you have children
from a previous marriage and want them to inherit some
of what you’ve worked for in your life.
A prenuptial agreement is key to ensuring you don’t lose half
of your assets in a divorce, and to protect bequests that you
want to give to family members or friends when you pass.
Like it or not, each member of a couple brings assets,
and sometimes debts, into a marriage. And, at the start of
most marriages, one member of the couple is wealthier
on the wedding day. The only way to preserve financial
harmony, and diffuse feuding among future heirs, is to as-
sign assets and debt responsibilities before the marriage.
Once you say, “I do,” it’s too late.
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HO T
RUS S I AN
BRI D ES®
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What you’re protecting
In theory, any assets you accumulate prior to getting mar-
ried belong to you. Lawyers call these “pre-marital assets”
and they can include anything from a house you paid off
before meeting your intended spouse, to cars and boats,
commercial properties related to a business, and other in-
vestments. Do yourself a favor and compile a complete re-
cord of these assets two weeks before your wedding and
put it on file at your lawyer’s office, just in case.
Your will should spell out who is to get both marital and
non-marital assets after you die – especially if you have
children. Problem is, not everyone bothers to draft a will -
because, let’s face it - nobody wants to think about death.
And that’s exactly why you need a prenuptial agreement.
In the absence of a will, most municipal courts will hand
a sizable portion of your estate (in some cases all of it)
to your current spouse. Your children can sue, but they’ll
almost certainly lose.
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