You’re excited to get married. You and your significant other have been engaged for months or maybe over a year. You’ve been planning the wedding and planning your life together after you get married.
But then you start thinking about the financial realities of marriage, and the fact that many marriages end up in divorce. You have far more assets than your future spouse, and you start to worry that they may take a significant portion of those assets if they ever asked for a divorce. You decide that the smart thing to do is to create a prenuptial agreement that you can both sign before the wedding.
Here’s the catch: The wedding is the next day. You’re not married yet, so you see this as your last chance to create the prenup in time. Can you do so?
This type of prenup likely will not stand
You generally cannot create a prenup the day before your wedding, even if you decide to bring it up to your future spouse and they agree to it. If you get divorced in the future, a court may not honor that prenuptial agreement.
There are a few reasons that they may use. For one thing, a prenup has to be created with enough time for both parties to read the entire document and carefully consider what it means. It’s easy to argue that giving someone less than 24 hours, especially during such a chaotic time in their lives, means that they didn’t really get to read it or consider it.
The wedding itself could also be considered a type of outside pressure, which may mean that your partner was under duress. If they decided that they didn’t want to sign the prenup, they may have worried that you would call off the wedding. This could be very embarrassing for them since the guests are already in town, and they may lose a lot of the money that they’ve already invested in things like hiring a band or renting out a venue. A prenup can never be signed under duress and only can be signed with free will from both parties.
The legal side of marriage
As you can see, the legal side of marriage and divorce can be much more complicated than people sometimes assume. Make sure you are well aware of all of your legal options.
