Your divorce has been finalized, and you’ve moved on from that time in your life.

Your new relationship is making you think positively about the future. More specifically, you’re now thinking about sharing your future with your partner.

If you see the value in car insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, disability insurance, and the like, then you should also see value in a prenuptial agreement as you consider taking your relationship to the next commitment level.

Plenty of misconceptions about Prenuptial agreements exist because people do not understand them as a multifaceted tool. The following points should explain why a prenup or postnup, just like a will, should be one more tool in your financial planning:

• Prenuptials aren’t always motivated by fear of divorce.

  Consider a prenup for estate planning and for avoiding inheritance drama, especially when children from another marriage are involved. Prenups have other uses as well, such as protecting a partner from your debt and third-party creditors (and vice versa).

• The prenup cannot validly occur under duress or coercion.

  Imagine a couple enters into a prenuptial agreement just a day before the wedding. If the marriage ends, the presiding judge will likely consider the scenario as coercion and invalidate the prenup agreement. Generally, the greater the assets involved, the more time you’ll want to allow between signing the prenuptial agreement and tying the knot.

• A prenup is not a total safety net.

  Your circumstances change, for better and for worse.

  Your prenup or postnup is worthless if you are invalidating this contract’s terms through your behavior; for example, if your prenup forbids you both from mixing funds in bank accounts but you do it anyhow, your agreement needs to be updated to reflect your current practices.

  Additionally, as many couples continue to work in their fields and to accumulate wealth, they will need to update their prenup or postnup to reflect their assets and their ideas about what’s best for them, their aging parents, and their older children.

• Prenups have limits.

  A prenup or postnup is a contract subject to Florida’s rules. While you can put just about anything into a prenup that you desire, the presiding judge may invalidate all or part of your agreement in a divorce.

  For example, child support cannot be dictated through a prenuptial agreement, unless the financial terms exceed Florida’s guidelines. An experienced attorney can help you to craft an agreement that avoids these pitfalls more effectively.

• Both soon-to-be spouses require legal representation.

  A valid contract requires that each side must have an attorney.

• Prenups aren’t exclusively for the rich.

  There are many reasons for pursuing a prenup, and these reasons are often unrelated to one spouse’s greater wealth.

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Interested in learning more about prenups? See our related post on prenuptial (and postnuptial) agreements: “Are you dating or in a serious relationship? Before you remarry…” and “Immigration, Marriage and Prenups.”

Warning: All posts on this website and partner website, JustPrenups.com, contain general information about legal matters for broad educational purposes only. The information is not legal advice, and should not be treated as such. This blog post does not create any attorney-client relationship between the reader and the DADvocacy™ Law Firm or between the reader and JustPrenups.com.