New Jersey Divorce & Family Law: How a prenup can help couples plan for the future. Attorney Abigale Stolfe explains your options for safeguarding your future with a prenuptial agreement.

Prenuptial or premarital agreements (often referred to as “prenups”) are often overlooked by couples who are getting married. Prenups tend to have a bad reputation, but they are an incredibly useful tool within a marriage. Premarital agreements outline the rights and obligations of both spouses and set up a plan that protects both parties in the event of a divorce or death. Often, couples find that simply having a plan in place allows for a greater level of confidence in the marriage and, in the unfortunate case of divorce or death, being prepared can greatly ease the process.

What Does a Prenuptial Agreement Cover?

Prenups help to settle many issues that typically arise during divorce negotiations. They may also be used to secure your future if a spouse passes away.

Prenuptial agreements typically include provisions for the following:

Though it is a hard conversation to have with your spouse, we believe prenuptial agreements provide the chance to make marriage bonds even stronger. They can increase communication between partners and help establish the rules of the future marriage.

WATCH: Attorney Abigale Stolfe Explains How a Prenup Can Help Couples Plan For the Future

How a Prenup Can Help Couples Plan For the Future | Stolfe Zeigler New Jersey Divorce Group | Stolfe

Contact New Jersey Family Law Group at (732) 585-1651 to schedule an initial consultation with our New Jersey lawyers to discuss your premarital agreement or other family law issue. Our team is here to provide you with the compassionate legal support you need.

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Transcript

On Stolfe Zeigler New Jersey Divorce, we are talking about premarital or prenuptial agreements. When we last spoke on June 22nd, we talked about when you’re living together as an unmarried couple, what do you do when you choose to break up or dissolve that relationship? And we had some conversation about how that dissolution would look. So today what we’re going to talk about is prenuptial agreements. Because a lot of times what happens is people start living together and they decide they’re going to get married. But by the time they’ve lived together for a little while, they realized maybe some financial differences between them or one person has some assets that they want to protect. Or the other person has a lot of debt that they want to insulate themselves from taking on. So often we see people coming and looking for a prenuptial agreement when they are taking that next step in the relationship.

And you can take it for a myriad of reasons. You do not have to live together to have a prenuptial agreement, but this is just oftentimes when we see people looking for this agreement. So a prenuptial agreement is often referred to as a prenuptial agreement, an anti-nuptial agreement, a premarital agreement. So if you are searching on the internet, you can use any of those different keywords to help you find different articles and topics. On this particular point, I would also let you know that back at the beginning of the pandemic, sometime in March, I posted a YouTube video and I believe a blog talking about this topic. And at that time I was speaking and interviewing, my boyfriend who did have a premarital agreement with his second spouse. And he talked about the pros and cons and, and what he was and was not able to address, and, importantly how it affected his divorce.

A lot of people understand the concept of the prenuptial agreement, but don’t quite get how it’s going to affect them down the road if they go through a divorce. So I would encourage you to go to our YouTube channel to listen to that video as well, read the blog associated with that video, which might give you just a little bit more insight because obviously it’s just me today and I don’t have him with me, although I did try to cohort coerce him to do it with me. So a prenuptial agreement is governed by statute in New Jersey, just like all the other agreements that we talk about during our Facebook Lives. And when you’re talking about different, that might affect a relationship. We talk about a palimony agreement. We talk about a prenuptial agreement. We talk about a property settlement agreement or a marital settlement agreement.

We talk about custody and parenting time agreements. So these agreements are generally speaking, all governed by a statute or a law that tells us what we need to make sure that we include work. If you don’t that you wave. So we’re going to talk in some detail about that because we had addressed this topic in a fleeting conversation previously, and we received a lot of questions asking for some more specificity on the enforceability of a prenuptial agreement, or ante-nuptial agreement and, and what should and should not be involved. So who let’s start with, who would want a prenuptial agreement? So I told you a moment ago that a lot of times its people who already live together and they’re looking to take the next step. That’s not required. It’s not a statutory mandate that you already have a cohabitating relationship. You can just be two people interested in getting married, who would want an agreement?

Well, someone who owns a business may want an agreement. Someone who it’s their second marriage or beyond may want an agreement. Someone who has a lot of who’s soon to be spouse has a lot of debt may want an agreement. I met with a woman not too long ago, who came in looking for an agreement because she was bringing over her fiance on a K-1 visa and she wanted some protection. She owned a house, she had a good job. The K-1 visa has its own separate set of financial mandates. But she wanted to really protect her assets, not so much the alimony provisions, she wanted her assets covered. So we spent a lot of time dealing with how to appropriately address the protection of her assets. So, maybe when you come in for a prenuptial agreement, you have a pinpoint view of a topic you want addressed or, or an asset you want protected.

It doesn’t mean you ignore all the other topics or potential issues. It just means that this is the thing that’s really driving you to this discussion. So if you have a wedding coming up or you’re thinking about going down that road, think to yourself, is there something I want to protect or something I want to protect myself from? If the answer to either of those is yes, then you need to have a conversation. You need to meet with a lawyer. You need to have a conversation about whether or not it makes sense for you to engage in this process of prenuptial agreement. It is a process. It’s a beneficial process. It’s an important process, but it is a process. What is the process? Well, you have to provide full financial disclosures. It’s not just, Oh, I have this. And he has that.

And you know, we’re going to move on with life. If you have a business, we’re going to recommend that you have an accountant, give a value of the business. If there’s a potential alimony issue, we’re going to recommend that an accountant provide a cash basis or cash flow analysis for you so that we can determine what your income is at the time the agreement is entered. If someone has a lot of deaths, well, we’re not going to, it’s just going to say, Oh, the debt is approximately $30,000. We’re going to say these are the debts. We’re going to list them. And we’re going to identify the value of those debts. We’re also going to, if someone’s coming in with a lot of debt and there’s maybe a little question as to the fiscal responsibility in managing debt, we’re going to address future debt in the prenuptial agreement.

Because that is just as important as support. You may enter into these agreements and think, okay, well I’m going to get married and we even have agreed. And actually we had a case similar to this. We have agreed that when we get married, we’re going to refinance the house, which is jointly titled. Let’s assume we’re going to take all the wedding gifts. And we’re going to take six months of our savings. And we’re going to pay off all of the husband’s debts. That’s we’re going to do it and pay all of his debts. It’s $30,000. That’s what we’re doing.

And you put it in a prenup. Well, what happens if during the marriage, the husband then incurs new debt to the tune of $30,000. Okay. So maybe it’s marital. Maybe he did it. Maybe he’s just financially irresponsible and it’s all marital. Maybe he owns a business that the prenup allocates exclusively to him and he incurred marital debt for his business. What are you doing with that? Well, if you don’t define what you’re doing with these single topic issues, then this is where you come into a debate at the end of the marriage. This is where the divorce becomes more complicated, right? Because is it fair to say that the husband is going to keep his business consistent with the prenup, but the marital estate is going to be depleted because of all the debt that doesn’t seem fair on its face, but maybe it is maybe because it’s the marital debt was really incurred because the wife insisted on taking the family on giant vacations every year.

And therefore debt went up and went up and went up. So you really have to look at in your prenuptial agreement, how are you going to address these potential red flags that may not seem an issue, right? Because we’ve already agreed that when we get married, we’re paying off the debt, but there could be more debt. And it’s the responsibility of whomever you work with to say, well, what are you going to do? In that instance? You can make a decision and you can say, we’re not dealing with it. We don’t think it’s going to happen. We’re not dealing with that topic. And that is perfectly acceptable and fine. It’s long as your agreement waves, that that’s where these prenuptial agreements tend to fail or tend to have some costs in the enforcement. Because if you don’t waive it and you don’t address it, then what are we doing with it?

And that is what you want to avoid entering into a prenuptial agreement. You don’t want to enter into these agreements only to find out that later on, you still have to have a fight that doesn’t make any sense. So when you’re entering into a prenuptial agreement, what do you have to have? You have to have full disclosure. Everything has to be on the table, your income, your debt, your assets, the value of your assets, whether it’s a 401k, a business, an annuity, whatever the case may be. It has to be valued and put right there on the table. You want to make sure you do that. Especially if you have a state pension and you’re in disability, you’re in a disability payment, you need to value the value of that disability payment compared to the value of the income generated from the pension, which are two, obviously different streams of income.

And if you’re receiving a disability pension, you know of what I speak. So once you have defined the income, the assets, the liabilities, then you can start talking about the terms of the prenup, because it’s really premature to have the conversation over. What are the terms going to be? If we haven’t, you have to find those other topics. So let’s assume that we have now defined all the topics. And now we’re going to talk terms of the prenup. What can we include? What can’t we include? You can include anything you want, anything you want to include. You can include, except you cannot predetermine the custody of the children. And you cannot predetermine the intake, the child’s entitlement to child support. So basically off-limits kids, kids topics off-limits, anything between the couple income assets, liabilities, alimony, acceptable. You understand the difference between you two that if it has to do with your children or future children, that’s out.

Why? Because child support is the vent is the child’s benefit. It’s not the benefit of the custodial parent. The money is designated for the care of child custody. Well, we don’t know in seven years, when you get divorced, whether or not the person who’s fit today to have custody of the future child or young child is the person who’s going to be fit at that time to take custody and care for the child. So you can’t predetermine those child-related issues. What you can do is you can determine that if we’re married for this period of time, one to three years, we’ve seen this before. We’ve done this before. If you’re married for one to three years, then your alimony entitlement is going to be based upon a percentage of the difference of income or a standard lifestyle that is consistent with where you are right now, not your future standard of lifestyle.

Or we could say your alimony is nonexistent between one and three years because the assumption is you’re both going to be able to work. Then you might do a next clause that says, but if it’s three to six years, well, then the alimony entitlement is going to change. It’s going to be higher or lower, or before we didn’t have an alimony entitlement from one to three, but now from three to six, we want the alimony entitlement included. We may not want to define it, but we want it included. We want to say that if we’re married three to five years, the, non-earning party or the lower earning party has an entitlement to alimony for a period of two years, you could talk about period, but not amount. There’s a lot of different ways you can handle alimony. The question is what is comfortable to the two of you and what is going to be enforceable when a prenup is being considered, those are your considerations.

Other topics you can include in your prenuptial agreement division of assets. So let’s assume that one of you has a business and it’s a startup business and the other one is working there and it’s going to have to devote a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of effort to help you make this business become what you both envision. The business can be well, a premarital business could be excluded from your divorce, whether you have a prenup or not, or it could affect the valuation of the business. If you don’t have a prenup, but if you’re both going to actively work it, and it really doesn’t have a significant value, you may come to an agreement in your prenup that says, well, we agree that it’s premarital, but because we’re both working it, and we’re both taking the energy away from the marriage to make this thing a success.

We believe it can be. We’re going to agree now that the premarital claim is going to be waived, or we’re going to agree now that the basis of valuation will be off of the value we determined today, or we’re going to agree now that the non-Title spouse, meaning the person who did not create the business is going to be entitled to 22% of the business. If we get divorced different ways, you can handle it. And again, you can handle it by time as well. If it’s one to three years, if it’s three to five years, I’m using these as examples. These are not set in stone.

So there’s a million different ways, depending on your independent and unique situation to deal with dollars percentages timeframes. And it’s all going to consider whether or not based upon the facts we know today, it is reasonably foreseeable that this would be an enforceable agreement in the future. Because when we look at the enforceability of the agreement, we look at the unconscionability at the time it’s seeking to be enforced. So it’s not whether today it’s unconscionable, obviously that would also make enforcement unenforceable. But when we go to enforce it, is it unconscionable because we have to look at what happened between the time you entered into the agreement and the time that you were seeking dissolution. So one of the jobs of counsel is to say, well, here’s all these different scenarios that could come to be in the course of the next 10 years.

If any of these scenarios come to be, does that make this provision unenforceable? And that’s really what you want your counsel to work with you on. You don’t just want to spill out. These are the terms and, and write it down and call it a day. Mean. You can do that if you, you know, if you want, that’s your call, but it’s probably not the best-laid plan, because if you’re going to pay counsel to help you with this, let them help you with it. And that’s really, one of the key helps, is what could foreseeably affect this agreement, right? We can’t predict the future, but we do this stuff all the time. So we have a good sense of, of knowledge, of what happens over the course of time, that you may not be considering in your bliss of the upcoming nuptials. So when do you start this process?

As soon as you can, you get engaged, you announce it to the world. You post your ring on all your instance, nannies and chattys, and you get your congratulations. And then you call the lawyer and you get the prenup set. Why? Because it takes time. We just talked about all the different pieces that go into a prenup. That’s not done overnight, nor can it reasonably be expected to be done overnight because you have to have a conversation. If one party does not have counsel or does not have the benefit of a conversation with counsel to look at these future anticipated possible unanticipated events. Well, when we’re looking at that agreement, 10 years later, one of the factors is going to be, well, I didn’t have time to talk to counsel. I didn’t have money to talk to counsel. I didn’t have, I just signed it because I just, he insisted.

So I signed it and you know, we, we went forward. What if someone’s pregnant? Right? I don’t know. I signed it because he told me if I didn’t sign it, he wouldn’t marry me. And I was six months pregnant and I’m Catholic. And my mother said I had to be married when I had the baby. And there’s a thousand things that come into play that are just real life. Those are just real-life scenarios that do matter when we’re looking 10 years down the road at the enforceability of this agreement. So it’s really important that you don’t save this piece to the last minute. This is a beginning of the engagement piece. This is not a final fitting piece. This is a, we got the ring. We started the prenup. Okay. That’s when you want to start this process because it is not quick, but it is critical to do it properly.

We received a lot of questions on this. I’m going to go through them because I see we’re about 20 minutes in. So, are prenups valid if it was signed the day before the wedding. Okay. So technically it’s valid. Technically a prenup can be signed right up until the moment of the wedding. Isn’t enforceable. I would venture to say probably not. Is it a good idea? I’m going to tell you absolutely not. Is it something that we recommend? Absolutely. Oh my God. No, because those little pieces are what the court considers, when they say was this person forced, did they have time to evaluate the terms of the agreement? Did they have any time to have input on the terms of the agreement? Did they have time to speak with someone about the future unanticipated to them, but foreseeable to someone who does this all the time events, if those answers are all going to be no, are going to be predominantly no.

Well, then this agreement is not going to be enforced. It’s just not going to be considered conscionable at the time. It is sought to be enforced 10 years down the road, right? That’s what we’re looking at. We’re looking at 10 years down the road. So what I would say to you is, again, if you are a person who is handed a prenuptial agreement, or you are the person who’s being asked to sign a prenuptial agreement, the, to set it aside will be on you at the time, 10 years down the road, right? So if you go in and you say, but wait, I was standing there in my wedding dress and I was handed something to sign the burden’s going to be on you to show why it’s unconscionable today. So if this is a topic which is brought to your attention, don’t look at your fiance and say, well, if you want it, you get it the real way to handle it is to say, if you want it, we need to deal with it now so that you can have input.

You can have say, and you can have the benefit of knowledge because it will be your burden when you’re looking to set it aside. So that is obviously a key issue. It’s not just on the person who wants it because in the future, it’s your burden. So that falls on you. How do you set aside a prenup? Again? I told you that prenups are governed by statute. All agreements are governed by statute. The statute is a 37: 2-38. And again, the burden to prove it’s unenforceable is on the person seeking to set it aside, not as consistent with the statute. The premarital agreement is not enforceable. If you can show by clear and convincing evidence that it was executed and voluntarily it’s unconscionable at the time enforcement is sought, or prior to the execution of the agreement, you were not provided full and fair disclosure of earnings, property assets, the financial picture.

If you didn’t get the financial picture, it can’t be fair if you did not voluntarily or expressly waive in the writing a right to disclosure of the property. So some people say, look, I get it. He’s got $30,000 in debt. Just write it down and thought, I don’t need to know each of the credit cards that it’s on. And you can do that. You can say, you can have that opinion, but in the document you have to say a future wife acknowledges that future husband has $30,000 of debt. She has chosen to specifically waive blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s really where you need to have it. You’d have a specific waiver under the statute you did not have, or reasonably could not have had adequate knowledge of the property or financial obligations of the other party. It is impossible unless the mail and now with all the email, chances are, it’s literally impossible.

How would you know, what is in your future? Spouse’s 401k, unless the mail comes and you open the mail, chances are it’s being done electronically. How would you know the value of a cash balance account? Unless you get something in the mail, which is probably coming by email, how would you know the value of their whole life cash policy? Unless you open the mail, which is probably coming by email and annually and probably through contract. There’s a dozen reasons why you can not necessarily assume that you have adequate knowledge of property or financial commitments because unless it’s coming by mail, I don’t know how you possibly could, that the party before execution of the agreement did not consult with independent legal counsel and did not voluntarily and expressly waived in writing the opportunity to consult with legal counsel. This goes back to the timing issue.

You don’t want to wait until the week, day, month before your wedding, because getting to an attorney that close in time for an attorney to do an analysis of a prenuptial agreement, to have a conversation with you, it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be difficult. So if you are the person who’s watching this video and you want the prenup, you most certainly want to make sure that the person, the recipient of the prenup, your future spouse has time has resources and has the ability to get to an attorney. Because if one of the criteria the court is going to consider is whether or not they had that opportunity. You want to make sure you do everything you can to ensure that happens. Right? We have had many cases in the past many cases where the future, titled owner, right? The wage earner, the future wage earner has sent well, the future spouse has called us.

We’ve read the agreement, but the future wage earner has paid those fees. Why? Because it’s that important. It is that important that both parties have an opportunity to review with counsel. All the things we’ve talked about through this point. So when you are the person who’s earning the money and you know, your future spouse cannot afford to do this on their own. It’s not a benefit to you. You’re not getting a leg up. You’re not doing any service to yourself by prohibiting them from having that independent review, because it’s only gonna hurt you if they challenge it 10 years down the road. So that’s what you want to become cognizant of. What are some items other people have put into a prenup that you found were not enforceable? Well, we talked about this to some degree, and that is what is not enforceable is anything that was not disclosed, right?

So you cannot say a husband keeps his premarital business and never disclose or cite any of the income value asset, or even what the business is. You can’t do that. That’s a non-disclosed asset. It doesn’t automatically go to the titled spouse. We talked about, you cannot put a provision in there for anything relevant related to child care, custody, or support. You can’t put in a prenup. We have seen this before, that in the event of a future child, and a future divorce, then the mother can move with the child to another state. That’s just layer upon layer upon layer of issue. Right? There seems very simple. It seems like, well, if I’m going to move to New Jersey and my whole family lives in North Carolina, I should be allowed to go back. Cause I’m making a concession to move up here. And I want to, I want to make sure he’s bound by my ability to go back.

You can go back. You just may not be able to take your child with you. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that it’s understood that we can’t put it in a prenup, but what do we need to know? What do you need to prepare for if that is something that, that you might consider in the future? So again, those relocation clauses, anything relative to the children, not enforceable, anything that’s not, specifically waived is not enforceable, and anything that is not disclosed without the specific waiver is not enforceable. So those are some things. What triggers dissolving a prenup, adultery, domestic violence, and is that standard? The answer is it’s a contract. So the dissolution of a prenup, it’s really not a disillusion per se. It’s a contract and contracts have start dates and contracts have ended dates or contracts have start dates and contracts have tiered modification dates.

And that’s really what a prenup is, right? When we talked about years, 1 to 2 and then years 3 to 6, and then you’re 6 to 10 and then anything beyond 10 is this, so there’s nothing domestic violence. Doesn’t trigger the termination adultery doesn’t trigger a termination unless you contractually bind yourself to that trigger. And some people do that. What some people do is they say, well, I’m going to agree to a tiered one, three, five, six, whatever clause. But if my spouse cheats on me and I can prove it and I can prove adultery, then in, in that event, they’re only entitled to two tiers ago or, if my spouse commits domestic violence against me, then this prenup is null and void and everything is on the table. That’s different, it’s a contract. So you can agree to whatever you want. We just have to look at whether or not it seems like it will be enforceable at the time you seek to enforce it or conscionable at the time you seek to enforce it. And that’s really the standard.

All right, how much financial disclosure is really necessary in a premarital agreement. There’s never enough financial disclosure. I mean that you have to put everything on the table. We stress that. I mean, just unbelievably, because that is how these things die by the sword. If you do not put everything in your agreement, this agreement will die by the sword. And it goes in total. It doesn’t go in the piece. It goes in total. So, there’s case law on this topic, and what it says is, a premarital agreement may be found unenforceable. If the wife had no true understanding of husband’s property or financial obligations and no real detailed sense of how much he was worth. So having a concept, an idea, a thought, well, I know he owns a lighting store, not enough, not enough. You have to have real knowledge or a written express waiver.

What is a sunset provision or clause? Someone must have looked that up: a sunset provision or clause and a prenuptial agreement is a clause that ends the agreement after a certain period of time. That’s what we keep talking about, right? These one to three, three to six, six to 10, 10, and beyond. These are sunset clauses. So three days, three year, once we have the first day of the fourth year, right? Three years have passed. We’re on the first day of the fourth year. That one to three has sunsetted away. It’s gone. We are now in the next phase, we’re in the three to six phase and we keep going down the track can my spouse and I make changes to our premarital agreement. Once we were married, the answer is yes, because a premarital agreement is a contract, but do not confuse this answer with a postnuptial agreement.

They are two very, very different things. So if you want to amend a prenuptial agreement, you can amend it, which means we have an agreement at the time we entered into the agreement. My soon to be spouse owned a home, we have since sold that home under the agreement, the equity derived from that home is his in its entirety. He has now taken that equity and put it into a home in joint title. We never dealt with that in the prenup because we didn’t have lawyers who anticipated that common next step. So we need to amend our prenup. Well, how do we do that? We take all the same steps. We reaffirm the prenup, but we deal with how we’re going to address this new joint asset in the event of a dissolution. There’s a dozen different ways to address that. And it goes by who contributed?

How did you contribute? Who’s paying for it going forward, et cetera. So a lot of it would probably be a conversation you would have to have in order to determine how best to address that now jointly titled home. But yes, you can amend notice that I used the assets and the topic that was already in existence. What I did not do was I did not say we have a prenup. When we got married, my husband had a premarital home and we both had a job working for AT&T. And, we both had 401ks and now we’re married and my husband quit his job and opened a business. And we want to amend the prenup to deal with that business. Could you do it possibly, could I see it being shut down? I could see it being checked out. Why? Because postnuptial agreements, meaning an agreement made after you’re married are not enforceable, right?

So we need to be really careful. Mid-marriage agreements are not enforceable. Premarital agreements are enforceable. So if you are listening to this, hear what I’m saying and hear clearly, which is if you are amending a premarital agreement based upon changes in terms that already exist, that you can do. If you are trying to circumvent an a, an equitable distribution claim by entering into a post-marital agreement, that’s not going to fly. So it is critical that you speak with counsel on that topic and really what you’re trying to achieve.

So when you’re talking about a post-agreement, the major difference in this amended agreement, and I’m going to keep calling it an amended because I want to be clear that it is not a mid-marriage agreement is the timing, right? Because you’re already married and the assumed bargaining power. So when you go before a judge, a judge is always looking at, you know, kind of gut feeling. What’s fair. What’s reasonable. Was everyone on the same playing field, right? Was everyone being treated fairly? There’s a thing called a fiduciary obligation to your spouse. When you’re married, you have a duty, you have an obligation to treat the person to whom you’re married fairly. So when you go into court and you say, well, I had this prenup, and then we did a PO, an amended prenup, a postnuptial agreement, the courts, the courts kind of go well, what’s that about? So that’s really where you want to detail the description I gave before I had a premarital home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

If you go in and you say I had a prenup and we amended it to this postnup and because we added this business that I didn’t have before, and now we’ve agreed that it’s excluded. And my income is capped at my AT&T salary. And your wife says, yeah, I did. I did find that I didn’t have a lawyer. I was eight months pregnant at the time. I was still working full time at AT&T because he had quit his job and decided to open this business. The courts are going to say, wait a second, wait a second. This is a bit suspicious to me. It’s a bit suspicious that you were okay with her supporting you all. You open the business, but now that it’s taken off, she doesn’t get a piece of it because of those circumstances. Remember, we’re always looking at the time of enforcement, right?

So what I suggest to you is the timing of your agreement is critical. The content of the agreement, was it already discussed or not? And the context of the agreement, if your wife is eight months pregnant and still working full time because you left your job and then you had her sign, a postnuptial agreement, I’m going to suggest to you that that’s probably not going to fly. Most prenuptial agreements are looked at with an eye towards they’re enforceable, which is why the statute says the person challenging. It has to show it’s not enforceable. However, there is this assumption, generally the postnuptial agreement and amended prenuptial agreement is not legally valid because it does seem to scream that there is some disproportionate bargaining power in this agreement. So what you want to do is you really want to think, and again, this is why having counsel look at those future anticipated or future unanticipated, but potential events is so critically important, because my guess is, if you are an entrepreneur who decided to open a business three years into your marriage, that is something you were thinking about prior to the marriage.

That is a topic you at minimum discuss to address how you will deal with it going forward in the future. So this is why it’s so important to really have someone to talk to, to have full financial disclosure and to have a conversation well in advance of the anticipated signing date, which should be significantly prior to your nuptials or your change, because we want everyone to be on a level playing field. So what I’ve done today is I’ve spoken for 40 minutes on prenuptial agreements following our last conversation about cohabitation. Next week, we are going to talk about palimony, which is another contractual agreement. So, if you’re gearing up for next week, palimony is our conversation next week.

Thank you for joining me. I hope you enjoyed today.