Pre and Post-Nuptial Agreements Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota
What advice do you have for people considering a premarital agreement?
What advice do you have for people considering a premarital agreement?
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00:04
well prenuptial agreements are
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you know there’s a place for them
00:09
if you’re coming in to say for for
00:11
example it’s a second marriage
00:13
and both parties are pretty established
00:15
financially and one party has 10 million
00:18
dollars in the bank and another party
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has a small business
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and
00:22
they’re going to get married
00:23
and they want to keep those things
00:25
separate
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and they want to you know make sure that
00:28
if they do get divorced
00:30
that those issues are not going to be
00:32
before the court dividing the business
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or dividing the um the money that
00:36
they’ve inherited or dividing
00:39
real estate that they presently own um
00:42
and there’s some nuance to that often
00:44
also there will there will be a
00:46
provision in a prenup that no spousal
00:48
maintenance will be paid
00:49
so you know people are doing that to
00:51
protect themselves um and the property
00:54
over a long period of time
00:56
the thing about pre-marital agreements
00:58
is if you’re really young and you’re
01:00
starting out as a partnership in
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marriage and say you have a hundred
01:03
thousand dollars here and fifty thousand
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dollars there and somebody comes to me
01:07
with a pre-marital agreement
01:09
the desire for one i often advise them
01:11
don’t bother
01:12
you don’t need it
01:14
those pieces of property are non-marital
01:16
there’s ways to keep track of it there’s
01:18
ways that i can advise you on how to
01:20
keep them separate so that if you do get
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divorced the non-marital components of
01:24
that property gets acknowledged by the
01:25
court and prenuptial agreements can put
01:28
pressure on on a partnership it can it
01:30
can almost interfere with
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people just
01:34
putting everything together and just
01:35
setting forth hand in hand in a marriage
01:38
so i don’t advise those for really young
01:40
people getting married the one other
01:42
caveat about prenuptial agreements
01:44
is that they need to be
01:46
procedurally fair
01:49
at the time that they are drafted in
01:51
other words if you’re getting married in
01:53
two days before the marriage you’re down
01:55
in the care of being at your destination
01:57
wedding and you whip out a prenuptial
01:58
agreement and hand it to your
01:59
prospective groom to be
02:02
and and say here you got to sign this
02:04
before we get married and and and they
02:07
and they they sign it you’re like well
02:09
okay i
02:10
i guess so you can imagine how that
02:12
would feel
02:13
they’re gonna come back
02:15
and if the person who presented that
02:17
tries to enforce it the court is gonna
02:19
say this was not procedurally fair you
02:21
didn’t give this person enough time to
02:24
consult an individual attorney on their
02:26
own to make sure that this was a fair
02:28
document so that’s what procedural
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fairness is and then it has to be fair
02:33
at the time of enforcement uh say you
02:36
have a prenuptial agreement and then
02:38
somebody in the marriage and you’ve
02:40
agreed to know spousal maintenance but
02:42
you’ve been married for 20 years and and
02:44
the person who
02:45
would be the recipient of spousal
02:47
maintenance maybe they had a medical
02:48
condition that prevents them from
02:50
working and there’s plenty of money on
02:53
on the other side a court is not going
02:55
to enforce that because it’s not fair
02:58
they’ve put 20 years in maybe they’ve
03:00
raised the kids they can’t take care of
03:02
themselves the court’s going to throw
03:04
that prenuptial agreement out
Minneapolis, MN family law attorney Michael Fink shares his advice for people considering a premarital agreement.
