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Sun May 03, 2009 12:03 pm  |
Please, please don't sign anything until you have a good lawyer--YOUR lawyer, not his--look it over for fairness. You are going to be giving up a lot if you go through with this marriage--it sounds like you will be putting school on hold at least for a while and possibly for a long while if you start a family. It sounds like the pre-nup he wants you to sign lets him walk away with all the "business assets" if he wants to, although I'm sure that any "business debts" will turn out to be shared with you. The job of his lawyer is to write a pre-nup that is as unbalanced as possible in his favor. You need someone who can make sure that your interests and the potential interests of your someday-kids get adequate protection. Believe me, I teach family law and I have seen a lot of these. As long as you sign them, most courts will enforce them even if they are unfair and unbalanced.
I think pre-nups make a lot of sense in second marriages, when a partner has kids by an earlier marriage and wants to be sure that the second spouse doesn't supplant the interests of those kids. They also make sense when one partner has uniquely valuable assets they are bringing into a marriage--though generally that pre-existing property is protected anyway in the event of divorce.
The kind of pre-nups that are subject to the most abuse, though, as those where one partner is likely to have the greater earning capacity but expects the lesser earning spouse to give up or slow down their career to make a nice home and family. Until, of course, some years down the road, when they have a mid life crisis and meet a shiny new partner that they want to trade their old partner in for and scram with all the assets. Those are the kind of pre-nups to beware of.
Only by having a lawyer that you hire examine it closely can you tell if this one is unfair. If it is, you have two options. One: have your lawyer draft a counter proposal and ultimately work out a compromise that protects both of your interests. Two: tell him that you won't sign and that if the pre-nup means more to him than you do, the relationship isn't what you thought it is. (And, of course, there is also option three, which is to sign it knowing that down the road you will probably end up older, wiser, and penniless.) |
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