You must be including those relationships that end in death, otherwise this is demonstrably untrue. And those circumstances would be covered by a will, not a pre-nup.
As usual in this type of thread, I’m with Dio - if you don’t fully expect the marriage to last until death, or at least completely trust your partner to do the right thing in a divorce, you need to rethink getting married.
Obviously this varies by state, but in most cases your new spouse would only be entitled to half the retirement savings you amassed during the time you were married to him/her (absent a pre-nup that indicated otherwise).
I picked the “I’d sign a limited one” option. I’d be willing to exclude large debts and/or previously owned property (say, a family estate) from a hypothetical future divorce settlement, but that’s about it. What people bring to a marriage can’t always be brought down to a dollar figure, and it’s insulting to try to reduce it to that.
I got married young, and neither of us had any money or debt at the time, so it would have been a pretty pointless endeavor for us.
Yes, I’m including relationships that end in death. Bad shit happens, no matter what, so people should be ready for it.
I trust people to try to do right by me when they love me. I don’t trust or expect people who don’t love me to make any sacrifices on my behalf, and when you’re talking about divorce you’re generally talking about people who no longer love each other. I don’t look at people and think, “This person is incapable of hatred or anger or spite or selfishness.” And I don’t look at myself and think it either.
Even an unenforceable pre-nup that stands as documentation of what we thought was fair when we loved each other is valuable.
It would depend on the terms of the pre-nup. Any half decent divorce attorney, can bust most pre-nups.
I would sign it but, as mentioned in a previous thread, after making sure that any children would be covered. I’m also fine with separate tax filing and separate property. Heck, I want to continue being able to file taxes in Navarra, so unless he was OK with having the conjugal address there, separate filing it is 
I think a lot of this is a question of beliefs and worldview. I personally would never have anything to do with a prenup, or with a woman who proposed that I sign one - but I think that for a lot of people, they’d make perfect sense.
I’m a Christian. I believe in - and have experienced - marriage as a religious calling. We are together because we are called to spend our lives together. And Jesus’ teachings about the relative importance of possessions is pretty unambiguous. To break this calling would be a sufficiently grievous and traumatic event as to make the loss of any possessions a pretty minor deal by comparison. I wouldn’t have married anyone who didn’t see things pretty much the same way.
In addition, many years ago, I developed my own short list of what two people had to bring to a marriage, going in. (As distinct from what they had to do to make it work, once they were married.) The first item on the list is mutual trust and respect. A pre-nup is pretty much a declaration of limited trust.
If I were single and a woman I loved asked me to sign a pre-nup, I’d tell her that if she didn’t trust me to be a person of integrity later on if we really did prove to have fundamental and irreconcilable differences, then we shouldn’t get married. And the fact that she was asking me to sign a pre-nup would demonstrate that I didn’t know her anywhere near as well as I thought I did, hence we shouldn’t get married anyway.
Like I said upfront, this doesn’t apply to everyone. You’ve got to be coming at this from the right worldview for it to make sense to you.
I or my husband would’ve signed one in a heartbeat. We just got lazy and never got around to drawing an official set of documents together. I think it’s important to realize that people and relationships can change significantly over a period of years, much less a lifetime. The person you marry today may be completely different from the person you’re married to in 10 years. And you have no idea what circumstances might influence that - for better or worse. Or, you might change.
I really disagree with the notion that a prenup is presuming you’ll split up; a prenup is like insurance that you’ll be protected if you do. You don’t assume you’ll get into a disabling car accident, but you get car insurance and short-term disability. You don’t assume that when you get married and/or have kids that you’ll die early, but you might get life insurance. Given the rate of divorce these days, it’s much more likely that you’d need the prenup before you’d need the life insurance. And people can get just nutty during a divorce.
The only reason I didn’t is that there’s not really much point in our case. Right now, she makes more money than I do, and has significantly more assets. I stand to inherit a tidy sum, and once I finish law school I will presumably make significantly more than she does.
So, there’s some short term risk to her, and some long term risk to me. I think that about evens out.
I’ve started yet another spinoff thread. You’re all welcome to keep the discussion in this thread, but I was hoping to get people to vote based on their relationship experiences. I’m curious about how many people who are in favor of prenups have actually been married previously, for example. I know that my views have shifted on the issue somewhat after having gone through a marriage that ended unexpectedly.
So if y’all would be kind enough to at least place your votes over yonder, I’d appreciate it.
As you said, depend on the state. Once the retirement assets start being used, they start to co-mingle with non-retirement assets and new assets. If I buy a retirement home with my retirement assets while we are married, to me that’s a transformation of the original asset - in a divorce that can look like a new asset that we jointly contributed to.
Seriously, most of the people on this board have a plan for what to do in case of a freaking zombie attack but they are afraid of planning what could possibly happen in the case of a divorce? How strange.
We put together a pre-nup and read through it only to find that we didn’t really need one at this time. We discussed it and determined we didn’t need to spend the money on the lawyer for the paperwork now but in the event that one of us decides to stay home with the children or has a major career change or what have you that we would revisit the idea in the form of a post-nuptual agreement. We love each other more than Santa loves cookies but we still acknowledge that stuff happens in life and it is better to be overprepared than underprepared.
Well, I wouldn’t be marrying someone who gave me an ultimatum. Because I consider that different than being asked to consider the idea and then having a thoughtful discussion about it.
I don’t see any sacrifice in with freely and voluntarily signing a pre-nup that is mutually agreed upon as fair and reasonable, so you’ll having to explain what is so self-sacrificial about my attitude. Sure, if you go into the thing assuming there has to be a winner and a loser, your attitude is going to be different. But not everyone has that assumption.
Who said they’re evil?
I’m already cynical to the point where I think marriage is a ridiculous institution in the first place. I got married once … and got divorced. I didn’t really want to get married; I just wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Marriage was just the conduit I was talked into going through in order to achieve that.
However, if I meet someone else who I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I developed some fever or delusion that convinced me to ask her to marry me and she said, “not without a pre-nup” I imagine I might just say, “fuck this” and go back to being my lonely cynical self.
If he/she has brought it up, they aren’t asking to have a thoughtful decision about it. He/she has already made up his/her mind-the soft sell comes first, after which the ultimatum will most likely be issued. I know that on the SDMB everyone’s a gifted snowflake 2 standard deviations away from the mean and whatnot, but we’re talking real life here, not a board where people without assets very seriously consider prenups. Unless you’re fucking a straight-up Aspergersy bajilionaire-asshole, no one is going to start out with the hard sell ultimatum.
I already high-lighted what you said, but I’ll quote it out below
This is a super bad idea. Don’t sign a prenup because you want to convince anyone of the purity of your love. I don’t know how much clearer I can be-if you want to convince the person that you’re non-materialistic, you’re much less likely to negotiate for even a portion of what you would have received without the prenup, which should be your goal. The other person’s goal is to negotiate you out of what you would have gotten, and he/she has made her intentions patently clear and is likely to be represented by counsel hired to ensure that goal. And even in spite of this, I see this attitude of falling over one’s self to dreamy-eyedly sign away rights to future earnings with impunity just to prove that the marriage isn’t based on mercenary intentions. I have a few friends married to senior investment banker types and they’ve done this AND quit their jobs and it’s like watching a glacial fucking trainwreck.
99.9999% chance that the pre-nup isn’t getting ripped up so assume that you want to get as much out of it as you can. And anyone who makes you sign it as a “test” of your love to then rip it up or say “just kidding!” or whatever is creepy and gross and you shouldn’t be marrying him anyway.
Or, you know, not. Some of us are very capable of having conversations about these things with no hard-sell ever.
If the mere act of suggesting a pre-nup is sufficient to turn “I love you forever; we’ll never part” to “you’re scum who wish only to use me and discard me at your convenience”, then that is the most fucking fickle eternal love I’ve encountered.
The way I see it, suggesting a pre-nup is a win-win situation. It may lead to a discussion of values and expectations regarding the relationship and what would/should happen in case it ends, ultimately ending in you getting married with or without a pre-nup, or breaking up because you realise you aren’t right for eachother. Or it may cause your partner to declare you the scum of the earth, in which case aren’t you glad you didn’t marry em?
So then are you going to get married without one if the other person says no, absolutely not?
The entire basis of the prenup is to negotiate as a self-interested economic actor and contract out of rights and obligations you would owe to your partner otherwise and/or mitigate the payments due. What world do you live in that you think a prenup is a document that acts to increase the transfers of assets to your spouse? That’s usually called a will.
Accepting that you can fuck your partner over with a will as well, of course-but the prenup is always to mitigate financial liabilities.