DW & I probably had a net-worth of negative $50-60K when we got married. So no need for a prenup. I will say if either kid got married probably after 28 or 30 I might recommend it if one in the marriage had way more assets they were bringing into the marriage. But maybe a prenup could lay out terms if one spouse stayed home during child rearing times. DW’s income has been curtailed because she stayed home for 7-8 years.
As far as separate bank accounts I am not a fan. As an accountant I don’t trust anything I can’t see in black and white. But also I feel separate ones could lead to one partner doing stuff with money that the other might not agree. God knows I might have blown some money on things if I didn’t have someone to keep an eye on things. Early in marriage we set a number of $75 for purchases. Anything over that number had to be discussed. Of course now that number is higher. We have always felt what we did was a team effort.
Both of my girls have a pre-nup before they got married. I was pretty adamant about it based on my own experience. I told them it was something they put away in a safe, and hope they would never have pull it out.
They have a family account with credit card to be used for family related expenses. They each transfer their share into it every month. They have their own accounts for their own expenses (clothes, hobbies, entertainment). I know D1 has a will that leaves certain amount to her spouse and remainder to her children. This is to ensure the kids would be taken care of even her spouse should remarry.
DH and I never gave a thought to having separate accounts. Why? Everything we own is “ours.” After we retired, though, he continued to consult to one client, and I suggested he open a separate account for those earnings and consider that his slush fund. I refer to that account as his hookers-and-beer-money. It’s all his; I have no idea how much he has or what he spends it on and don’t care. I do have complete access to it, though, as it’s just another account tied to our joint bank account.
We didn’t have much when we got married in our 20s, so no prenup (never even a thought about it). And everything, 32 years later is still “ours”. My income has gone up and down as I worked full time, then part time when kids were born, then back to full time, and now back to part time. But even when part time, I made the same or more than my spouse. But spouse has great health insurance for the the family. And is super handy which saves thousands.
So I have never got how separate accounts work. What if DH stays home when the triplets are born - they have no money of their own? What if I want to go to Paris and spouse can’t afford it? What if spouse is a saver I am a spender?
Obviously, people have figured these things out. And it works for many people.
ETA: I do get women needing to protect themselves. They need to have credit, their names on the assets, etc. And I am a believer in women being able to support themselves/keeping their skills up, etc.
I stopped working for many years, shortly after S was born. All our assets are “ours.” We only have joint accts. We are satisfied and don’t want nor need extra book keeping.
We have always considered all of our assets to be ours. Although not all of it may be labelled as such. For example, since I was the person without a full time job and was able to do the shopping, the last several cars have all been titled in my name.
In my opinion, more reason to have one, especially if one spouse brought more of that debt into the marriage.
I wish my daughter had one that spelled out what is hers (nothing but student loans) and his (everything else, including the house, his pay, most of the cars). He’s very generous with her, but she has no idea where she stands. Part of his pay for 2 years is a housing allowance (big one) from his employer, so he’s paying the mortgage down but that can be tracked to him paying every payment should anything happen to their marriage. She pays her student loan , her travel, and her thrift store shopping habit.
We have joint bank accounts, but we do not have joint credit cards. Each of us has our own credit card…and we have one card that is DHs that I’m an authorized user on.
My son got married in August, then at Thanksgiving brought home an envelope with their pre-nup in it and I put it in the filing cabinet, unopened. D has had a long-term partner since 2018, but no engagement or wedding yet. We did not have a pre-nup, but we had separate checking accounts for years. We had a ritual of getting the Citibank credit card bill and marking our initial beside each entry, or a J for joint and then splitting it, when we used to get paper bills in the mail. By the time I cut back my hours to part-time, we slowly commingled our checking accounts, and are now fully commingled.
But a train wreck developed when my dad married his second wife. As best as I can tell, the pre-nup was coerced, and the wedding almost got derailed because . . . drama, drama, drama. That marriage ended in divorce, and that wasn’t pretty either.
So we are pretty risk-averse. The engagement of the estate attorney led to further discussions about sharing our assets. I have pre-nup/divorce/estate PTSD.
I have friends in my age range. Several divorced and ended up with giving their ex spouse half of everything. In the two I’m most familiar with they were helped a lot with buying their homes by the their parents. The homes were bought in both spouses names so the husband got half. One friend when she got divorced her parents helped her buy another house. You can bet her parents made sure that the 2nd spouse had no claim on that property.
In a community property state it doesn’t matter if each spouse keeps a separate bank account and pays their own expenses or splits the living expenses. In a divorce what is earned during the marriage belongs to both of them.
AFter a brief stint professionally, I was a SAHM for many years. One Christmas my dad handed me a big fat envelope which turned out to be an investment account in my own name, with my husband as beneficiary. He said to me/us – what you do is valuable, and God forbid something happens to you, but DH will need this money for a nanny or childcare. Just because you don’t get a paycheck doesn’t mean you don’t have value.
ShawSon did not do a prenup when he got married four years ago. ShawD is getting married next month and has done a prenup with her partner. I gave them some coaching on how to make things fair and gave her advice later as they were negotiating. The interesting that was that their lawyers kept coming up with highly unlikely circumstances to build in contingencies for.
My friend and her H have separate accounts. It’s at least largely because he is frequently “contributing” to his extended family and she is weary of it and has other priorities. They’ve been married for 40 years and it works for them. I am unaware as to whether folks do or don’t have prenups and really don’t feel it’s any of my business.
We have mostly joint accounts. (though we each have our own decent sized 401k). In early marriage, the checking account was owned by DH with me as the joint owner. When we moved to CO (in early 1990s, before online access), I told him we needed to make me to be primary… unless he wanted to do all the banking gruntwork (which was not too hard - credit union at our workplace… just extra hoops for me if not primary.)
My divorced kid will definitely have a pre-nup on marriage number 2. Having had a settlement the first time that was less horrible than the courts could have imposed, but resulted in paying a great amount to the ex than I would judge was ethically “fair,” The ex was financially immature & inexperienced & viewed my kid’s earnings as theirs to share and ex’s earning as their personal discretionary income, kiddo will want to clearly discuss finances and marry someone who cares more about being responsible.
Having kids also means discussion of future “Brady Bunch” scenarios & forces the new couple to have some deep conversations before proceeding.
I’m hearing about prenups among my friends’ kids – not because they have assets themselves but because they will inherit large amounts from their parents and both sets of parents want to protect their own financial planning.
