A lot of the way it helps is information up front. If you think you are in a “everything would be split” or “if I become a SAHP, of course my spouse would want that to continue if we got divorced” or a “well, obviously, if we split up, I wouldn’t be responsible for his med school bills” relationship and during the pre-nup negotiations you discover that your fiancee is of very different opinions - well, now you are armed. You work through the details of the pre-nup having discussed those issues.
Likewise, if you have a prenup that says “my spouse gets half” you might cut your losses while there is still half left where without the prenup, you might stick in it. Or, if knowing that your prenup takes into account your contributions and liabilities as individuals, you might be more willing to try and get your spouse through a rough patch - and if the rough patch turns out to be a lot of rough years, you have knowledge on the risk. If you are in Foxy’s shoes, knowing that her deadbeat husband wasn’t going to get half, she stuck it out - probably longer than she should have given what was going on, but ignoring those complications, it allows her to measure the financial exposure of sticking it out longer.
I get the feeling that you and your husband talk through a lot. My husband and I do as well, but that isn’t a universal case. A few years ago three of the guys I was working with were all divorcing their wives. In every case, a critical factor in the divorce was that they’d made a mutual decision that she’d stay home while the kids were little. The kids were all in middle school and their wives had decided not to return to work…ever.
My point exactly. So legally, he’s on the hook to take care of her because she likes the home life and he can’t physically drag her to work each day. What makes it worse is that he is stuck because he would have to support two households simply because he has been bamboozled into a life he didn’t sign up for. A prenup would have prevented all that.
For, but my wife and I didn’t bother with one. For one thing, we had virtually no assets other than our house (which she gets to keep, as my name isn’t on the mortgage), and for another, she currently makes more money than me but I will probably be making more in 10 years.
You missed the bit where you should have made it clear that you were talking about the probability that a mother would take more of a career hit than a father due to the probability of the mother having borne more of the parenting load, and therefore being more likely to have fewer savings and lower earning than her spouse at age fifty.
I can certainly see the need for a prenup if either party has children. But I wouldn’t have married the first time around if my fiancee had insisted on one. Our focus should be on making a life together, not carefully planning for its demise.
I believe in them. If I’m going to merge my life in every way possible with another person I want to treat it with the seriousness I believe it deserves. I didn’t buy a house without having a contract and a lawyer help me out so I’m not going to get married to someone without some kind of paperwork.
I realize this isn’t for everyone and I truly do respect that belief, but I wouldn’t marry someone who didn’t agree. It’s not right for everyone, but right for me.
Then it would make more sense to live together rather than formally marry, for there are usually (depending on your jurisdiciton) fewer specific terms concerning separation for people who live togther without getting married than for people who get married.
One of my favorite movies is Gattaca, and there’s a key scene in it which I’m about to spoil for the sake of a metaphor.
Two brothers, Vince and Anton. They engage in all sorts of competitions, one of which is swimming races in the ocean–whichever brother can swim the furthest out to sea wins. Vince, against all odds, wins. Later in the movie, Anton challenges Vince to a rematch, and again, Vince inexplicably wins. Anton asks how he did it, and Vince responds, “You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.”
That’s obviously foolish and deadly, and it’s also the only way to win such a contest.
Marriage is a bit like that for me. I’m married and I plan to be married my entire life to my wife. I’m not going to save anything for the swim back. I don’t have a prenup, and I would have refused to sign one, because that would be planning for a divorce.
Other folks are more comfortable with the idea of a divorce than I am. Me? no way. Anythings possible, of course, but I’m going to live my life as though it’s not possible, because by doing so, I give my marriage everything I’ve got.
Are you talking 2nd marriages? If so, there are compelling reasons to marry, including medical insurance, and the right to make medical decisions for a spouse who is incapacitated.
Generally, if a (hetero) couple has kids, the woman takes much more of an earnings hit than the man does. She’s usually the one who is careful to get a job where she can miss days if the kid is sick, and where she can be sure that the hours will be compatible with the child’s school and day care hours.
Such jobs tend to be lower level jobs, and she’s likely to be stuck on the mommy track, not the career track. She can’t take a job that will entail a lot of traveling, or that will require occasional or regular long hours, unless her husband is prepared to take a career hit himself. It’s very hard for a doctor or lawyer to be a single parent, for instance, without a full time nanny.
So, not only will the woman earn less during the prime child rearing years, she won’t be able to make up those years, and she won’t have the CV to get a better job when her child(ren) hit the teen and adult years. Her earnings are less during the child rearing years, and forever afterwards as well.
I support pre-nups; hell, I have one. My husband has a child from a prior marriage so a lot of his previous assets are earmarked, in the case of a split, to support his son. I get it! I figure, we’ll never split up, so, while it puts him at ease, it doesn’t really matter
What I also like about our pre-nup is that is specifies the support I’m entitled to if things go sour. I know exactly what to expect. I’ve been watching my parents go through a divorce, with no pre-nup, and my mom keeps fighting for more and my dad has no clue what he’ll be left with. It’s an awful situation and, if everyone had just known what to expect, financially, on the other side, it would have been better for everyone.
I’m aware of that, it’s just not relevant to the point I was making (which was not meant to be an exhaustive summary of all the issues, or even anything like that!)
Certainly I never said that the ex-husband SHOULDN’T pay for the ex-wife, especially in those circumstances. But I said that a cynical view of self interest, he wouldn’t want to get in that position.
But also, I was being careful and trying not to assume gender roles. The only thing I was assuming was the bilogical clock basically - which was not to say that women are “worn out” as you put it; just that they don’t have the options to make kids in the future that men will.
And I guess I see a prenup there as a band-aid on a more serious problem: you should be talking about those things regardless. Also, it seems to me that if a couple is that blind to each other’s worldviews, they will most likely keep that blindness: whatever the prenup says, they will both assume that the other person really agrees with them.
And I guess I tend to think that vastly more often than not, in these cases you are better off having an incentive to cut your losses than not. A marriage that is miserable for 20 years is not more successful than one that’s miserable for 5.
How would a pre-nup help in this case? I can’t imagine one that said “Both spouses will work full time once unless any children under the age of five remain in the home. In the event that one spouse does not pursue employment after the first of September in they year the youngest child turns five, all assets earned (including accumulating equity in the home) become the sole property of the person earning them”. I mean, who would sign such a thing? It would have to have exceptions clauses, like “Unless both partners agree that one spouse staying home is a better solution” and I bet all those wives think that is the case.
Furthermore, the only way the husband would have to support two households in these cases is child support, which he would have to pay anyway, prenup or no. On-going spousal support is very limited, especially when the stay-at-home spouse has been out of the work force for only a few years. He would lose half the property they earned while married, but that’s my point; it’s their property, it was never just his.
First or second. If the approach is to keep options open (because you have no idea of what your financial and parenting situation will be sometime down the road), and to do what is fair at the time of separation (rather than be committed to the terms set out in the body of statutory family law), then then living together in a committed spousal relationship rather than getting married would keep some options open (depending on jurisdiction).
Family law for married couples is usually (depending on jurisdiction) more certain than family law for non-married spouses. (NOW DON’T ANYONE TAKE THE FOLLOWING AS BEING THE LAW WHERE THEY LIVE. DIFFERENT PLACES HAVE DIFFERENT LAWS, AND THE FAMILY LAW AS IT APPLIES TO NON-MARRIED SPOUSES IS CHANGING QUICKLY.) For example, as a very broad generality, usually there is no difference between the two types of law for custody, access, or child support. Usually there is only a very small difference between the two types of law for spousal support (primarily being that entitlement arises upon marriage, but may take a few years if there was no marriage). Usually there is a very big difference for equalization or divison of property (the law for marries spouses tend to be formulaic, whereas the law for non-married spouses tends to be more equitable). It’s this last one – formula v. equity – that is the biggie when it comes to separating after a relationship.
For example, if married spouses gave me their financial information, I could calculate their property equalization to the penny under the formula used in my jurisdiction. Most of the fighting would be on whether the numbers they provided were accurate or not. If, however, non-married spouses gave me their financial information, I would not be able to calculate a property equalization without getting into what would be fair given the contributions each party had made during the relationship, for in my jurisdiction, there is no formula to follow if the spouses did not marry.
Where it can get nasty is when one party think that he or she is morally entitled to something that the other party does not agree to. For example, where I am (note that this varies by jurisdiction), if a person owns a house that is mostly paid off but still has some of the original mortgage owed on it, then gets married and lives in that house with the spouse, and then the spouses separate, the value of the house is shared equally between them. That leaves the homeowner, who feels entitled to the entire house, being extremely dissatisfied with the law that takes away half of what he or she feels would be fair.
Now let’s take the same scenario, but change it such that the spouses never married. The homeowner would keep the house, not just half of it, and thereby feel that the law was fair (equitable). The non-homeowning spouse might be upset at not getting half the house, but if that spouse did not make any contributions to it, that spouse would not be able to gaina protion of the house simply by having lived there rent free for a number of years. If the non-homeowning spouse did make contributions either directly (paying toward the mortgage) or indirectly (paying for food while the other spouse paid down the mortgage), then the non-homeowning spouse would be able to get a fair (equitable) share of the home-owning spouse’s property based on the contributions made during the relationship, so that both parties could come out of the separation feeling that the final split of assets was fair/equitable.
Of course this is a two edged sword, for by it not being arbitrary, it opens the possibility for one party to accumulate assets while the other loafs, so it makes a lot of sense to make a domestic contract early on and to pay attention to being equitable throughout the relationship by moving assets as may be appropriate so that on an ongoing basis the parties feel that each owns a fair/equitable portion of the total assets between them.
