You commonly see the idea that one could marry a millionaire, or deceive them into a marriage, and then get divorced a week later and get half of their assets.
I have seen people claim this for the reason they have guardianship over adults with cognitive issues, that someone could swoop in and steal half their meager bank account or take half their house etc.
This is counter to every divorce in real life I’ve ever known of, and law I can find. In fact courts go to great pains to establish exactly which assets were pre existinng even in long valid relationships.
Sure if you’re married for a decade and have kids and income and assets are commingled there is likely to be a 50/50 split of those assets, but not in a week long marriage.
About 98% urban legend. There’s a tiny kernel of truth in there.
If during the honeymoon the fatcat puts the gold-digger’s name on the asset accounts as joint owner, then yes, the gold digger now gets half of those assets when the divorce hits next week. But darn few fatcats will make this rookie mistake. Though there’s nothing to prevent the gold-digger from testifying during the divorce that “he/she *promised *to do that!! Waah! I want my money!.” “He said vs. she said” is always a dilemma for judges and awarding even a token percentage of a big fortune might be a real nice payday for the gold-digger.
In the real world …
Slowly over time during a marriage the spouse gains a claim over the income and assets produced during the lifetime of a marriage. So for the more typical case of first-time marriage of youngsters with no assets, by the time the divorce happens years later it’s true that 100% of everything they own was gained during the marriage and is split accordingly: 50%/50%. It would also be true 2 weeks after the marriage, but 50% of all they earned in the last two weeks won’t be much.
The bigger case where trusts like that become useful is when the person with a permanently dependent adult child remarries late in life. The new spouse has no affinity for the kid. A few years (or days) later the parent dies, leaving all his/her assets to the second spouse. Who now sees no reason to share any of it with the deceased kids, healthy or dependent.
*If *the decedent had created a trust ahead of time to take care of the kid, or written his/her will properly to do so at the time of death, the problem would be averted.
Related question: Isn’t there a doctrine that if an asset is inherited that the spouse can’t get it? Does this depend on the state? Does the degree of ownership change with time and ongoing cost of maintaining the asset?
The important question with an inheritance is whether it was commingled. If you keep the inheritance separate and entirely in your name, it typically is not included in a division of property during a divorce. If you put it into a joint bank account and use it for joint expenses, it is no longer considered separate property.
If you’re talking about real estate, it would depend on whether you put it in both your names, or if you lived there together and maintained it jointly. If it is kept entirely separate and in your name, it should not be subject to a divorce settlement.
As disappointing as it is to see people who accumulated a lot of wealth marry someone who then claims a large portion of it for no reason other than that they fell into a position akin to a very highly paid prostitute…
I was married for 10 months, 2 weeks when I filed an Order for Protection against my wife and had her removed from the house. She then filed for Divorce. I had sold my house when we got married, netted $90k in profit and then discovered that my new wife had been lying about her debts, and instead of being about $6k in debt, she was over $40k in debt. I paid all of it off.
Now in her divorce filing, she tried to claim that I still had all of that $90k hidden away and was trying to conceal assets in our divorce and she was owed half of everything I had. I provided proof (cancelled checks) as to what I paid on her behalf, and we set out from there.
At the end of it, they had no choice but to recognize that she basically owed me that > $40k and we (at long length and many lies and stalling later) agreed on the repayment of $27.5k. Her parents paid me the money, since of course, she was completely broke and had a credit rating somewhere south of Black Hole.
Which was not a great outcome for her, since I had initially stated that I would accept $10k and would write off the rest, but then the lies, attempts at false criminal charges and claims of fraud started and I decided that she was going to be made to pay for that shit.