“We are seeing an enormous uptick in the demand for prenups and the age of the typical prenup client is also coming down.” —Debra Schoenberg, local divorce attorney
among state laws that a prenup entered into in one state would be honored by the courts of another state. Still, only 28 states—California is one of them—and the District of Columbia have adopted some version of it. This may matter if a couple signs a prenup in one state and weds in another, like “Kara.” Community property and prenups When Kara reconnected and fell in love with a man two decades after they and their former spouses were neighbors, Kara, who prefers to use a pseudonym, knew there was no way she was going to get married
Prenups the old-fashioned way Prenups are hardly a new idea. The Hebrew marriage contract known as the ketubah, a legal document that not only legitimizes the marriage but also details the groom’s financial obligations to his wife in case of divorce or widowhood, dates back 2,000 years or more. In France, the prenup agreement derived from a woman’s dowry and was first recorded in the ninth century, according to Seymour J. Reisman, a divorce lawyer in New York. In the early Middle Ages, marriages were nothing
more than a private contract between two families that addressed property exchange and that also provided the wife some financial protection in case her husband died, divorced or deserted her. Prenups were
again without a prenup. Not only did she have more assets than he did, but he also had a substantial amount of debt after a messy divorce, a health crisis and tax bills after the demise of a business partnership. Kara, who had a brief marriage in her youth and then a 27-year marriage in which she had three children, updated her trust at the same time they drafted a prenup in California before tying the knot 14 months later in Louisiana after
originally a way to protect wives in the days when women were typically not
allowed to have money or property of their own. The handful of wealthy heiresses in colonial America required their
would-be husbands to sign prenups as a way to suss out male gold diggers, who, due to coverture laws that gave husbands total control over their wife’s wealth, had an incentive
their reconnection. “I knew I was taking some risk, getting married when we were in the super
to marry for money, as University of South Carolina School of Law professor Marcia A. Zug writes in her just-published book, You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other Than Love . She also notes that women who immigrated to America during colonial days to become the first “mail-order brides”—most of the early colonists were men—were able to convince their would-be husbands to sign prenups that often allowed them to keep their dowries and afforded them “significant monetary benefits, power and independence.” But prenups only began gaining popularity as a way to address the repercussions of divorce—which was harder to get before no-fault divorce was first legalized in 1969 by California Gov. Ronald Reagan—and not just death of a spouse, after World War II. Still, for many years courts didn’t always honor them. The Uniform Premarital Agreement Act was drafted in 1983 and updated in 2012 as a way to ensure more uniformity
honeymoon phase of the relationship,” says Kara, in her 60s, who splits her time between Marin County and New Orleans. “That felt pretty quick being that I hadn’t seen him in 25 years. I felt like I needed to protect myself just in case my instincts were wrong.” Mostly, she wanted him to pay off his debt in a way that he may not have chosen himself. Although his prior debt in a community property state like California wouldn’t automatically become a joint debt, there are some exceptions, such as when a spouse becomes a joint account holder after marrying. “I was asking him to really step up and deal with his financial trouble. I pretty much asked him to wipe out his savings accounts to get out of debt and really pushed him to get to zero on debt and helped him where I could. It did feel
50 NorthBaybiz
February 2024
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