Out of principle I would have never agreed to a pre-nup. Also, neither my wife nor I had anything prior to our marriage so a pre-nup wasn't a factor. A pre-nup is like saying a marriage is a financial contract.........just does not make sense in my book.
I think it makes sense in a LOT of cases. No one (pre-nup) or not goes into a marriage thinking it will end short, or that if it did end, that the spouse would try and take everything you have. But I have seen FAR too many cases where that happened.
Nope! Find the right one and never consider divorce an option. Proverbs 31:Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life. ... Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
"One flesh" has nothing to do with a family owned business or farm, in many cases prenuptial protect the ones you love from law suits and the threat of bankruptcy, for those of you that do not own your own company it might not make sense, but why would you want to do financial harm to your wife by leaving her unpaid debt or contract liabilities she can not fulfill. A "prenupt" can be a very wide ranging contract .
Enlighten me some more. I thought the discussion was about whether or not to have a prenuptual agreement in case of a divorce. There are other means to protect your wife in case you die, if that is what you are referring to. I guess I am a bit confused by what you mean.
As husband and wife in PA all sets and debts are split 50-50, which means as my business is a Chapter S corp my company income is taxed at our personal rate, what I owe, she owes, yet she has no way of generating the income I can, yet she is directly responsible for one half of the tax bill I generate. So if I spend the "income " I generate on business "expenses" I can basically earn and spend her into bankruptcy. So to avoid this, and since I started the company " unlike those you that had Obama build" years after we were married and we have no prenupt, I gave her my half of the company and I work for her, and she pays me dearly for it. My farm on the other is a completely different story, it is in a land trust .
As the saying goes, "We started with nothing and still have most of it left." That is where we were when we got married. Prenup was not an issue.
I admire your desire to protect her from debts that she did not create and I don't want to get into your business but couldn't you "spend her into bankruptcy" under Chapter C just as easily? The only difference is it would be as a personal debt instead of a business debt. That is possible under any mutual financial arrangement, is it not? I can certainly understand the use of a prenuptual agreement to save a spouse from marrying into a situation where they would become the recipient of a pre-amassed debt situation. I know many who have fallen into that bog. But I am thinking that kind of stuff really needs to be made known prior to marriage. Wow... That raises a whole new discussion... But for the sake of the original question, a prenup to avoid losing one's aquired assets in case of a divorce runs counter to the point of marriage. However I also know there are "gold diggers" out there with a very skewed idea of marriage who will marry to grab all they can. If that is the case... you probably don't have a marriage but a battlefield. Man; God bless anyone stuck in such a situation.
In my case my daughter would be insane to marry any one with out one, and any one that would marry her with out one is a fool. In the case of a c corp personal property and corporate property are two different entities. With personal property protected from corporate liabilities buy simply filing chapter 13 bankruptcy. Acquiring assets and keeping assets are two very different things.
Great discussion guys. And that was kinda my point. Folks just think it is a trust thing....it is, and it isn't. It goes much deeper than folks realize.
And protection for a loved one is quite different than protecting one's self from a loved one... got it... I agree. The marriage itself, however, should never be relegated to a mere contractual agreement. It is a covenant, which means for richer and poorer, sickness and health until death do us part. Too many people going in thinking about grabbing the good parts but bailing at the first sign of trouble. It is sad though, when future husbands and wives feel the need to protect themselves from the person they are about to enter the holiest and most intimate relationship known to man with.
I think you would shutter if for a fact you knew how many of todays marriages are about little more than the financial aspects of their lives in the future. Their are very few single middle aged people that can afford to live the life style they lost in a divorce. The grass might not be greener on the other side but the cash can be.
I try to stay on the shy side of humble, its harder some times than others, but I do put an honest effort forth. I used to look up to Rancid just to know at what level the bar had been set, but that measure has been absent as of lately.
