Prenuptial Attorneys in Long Island

What a Prenuptial Agreement Does for Couples

When a couple is thinking about the possible benefits of a prenuptial agreement; it's an extremely personal decision. Each marital situation is different. The decision must be made on a couple’s individual set of circumstances. Prenuptial agreements are becoming popular with people of modest means as well as the wealthy.

Avoid Financial Disagreements

One of the main causes for divorce is finances. When couples can discuss the financial issues involved with their marriage before being married, it can avoid many misunderstandings. This agreement can cover such issues as property, assets, financial obligations and more. This avoids disagreements over unknown financial issues during the marriage. This is also an effective way to nurture positive communications between a couple.

What To Include

Legal experts will advise couples considering a prenuptial agreement to determine what they want it to do for them. They may want to identify what assets are joint and which ones they want to keep separate. Family property and providing for current as well as future children should be discussed. How children from a previous marriage will be handled financially should also be determined. An agreement should be reached on the responsibility of individual as well as joint debts. How household bills will be handled as well as taxes and more. Finance and investment goals need to be addressed. Distribution of property and assets in the event of a divorce should also be discussed and included in the prenuptial agreement.

Financial Rights

A prenuptial agreement can be used to clarify the financial rights of each marriage partner. People may want to have their different financial rights and responsibilities established prior to marriage. It's also possible for people to make certain assets will remain with them if the marriage ends. This could involve such assets as real estate and more that could increase in value during the marriage. There are states that won’t permit a spouse to not pay alimony. The alimony listed in a prenuptial may not be honored by a court in some states. This is true if it denies alimony, and the spouse to receive it didn't speak with an attorney prior to signing the prenuptial.

Your Investment in Your Spouse’s Education

If you finance your spouse's post secondary education so that he or she is pursuing a degree, you are, in a sense, making an investment. After he or she graduates, you will have a more prosperous lifestyle as their income increases. If after graduation, you end up in divorce, your spouse will continue to reap the rewards of the degree.  If you don’t have some provision in place to protect you in a situation like this, you stand to lose your investment. A wise prenuptial attorney will proactively address this problem by including the value of the degree in your prenuptial agreement.

Child Support

A prenuptial agreement cannot include child custody issues such as child support and more. A court will be involved with this decision. It will be decided by a court based on what it determined to be in the best interest of any children involved with the marriage. Many different factors will be taken into consideration when deciding issues affecting children.

Other Clauses You Would Not Have in a Prenuptial

Clauses Based on Non-Monetary concerns

All potential clauses that cover concerns other than monetarily-based ones should be excluded from a prenuptial agreement. For example, your prenuptial agreement must not stipulate how often you engage in intimate relations, any requirements regarding housework, or limitations on visits from inlaws. Under some circumstances, courts in Long Island may simply ignore these types of clauses.  Nevertheless, there are some scenarios in which a court can rule that terms like these render the entire agreement invalid.  

Unjust Clauses

Even though a prenuptial agreement is a legally binding contract when it is valid, judges can strike your agreement down as invalid if any of the terms are perceived to be unfair, unjust or deceitful. Your prenuptials attorney in Long Island can look at a proposed prenup before you sign to give you the assurance that it doesn’t contain terms that could be considered unfair for you.

Valid Prenuptial Agreement

Many courts will carefully scrutinize a prenuptial agreement. Many of them will include a waiver of a financial or legal benefit for the spouse who is not wealthy. It's common for the wealthy spouse to be the one who wants to end the marriage. Every state will permit couples to enter into a prenuptial agreement. If the agreement is determined by a judge to be unfair, or not in compliance with the state’s legal requirements, it will be considered invalid and set aside.

When a couple is considering a prenuptial agreement, it's important they negotiate honestly and in good faith. They need to work with an attorney and create a document that is easy to understand, clear and meets their needs. Having separate lawyers review it, and agree with it, will help the chances of a prenuptial agreement holding up in court.

The Fortitude of the Contract

Just as all contracts, your prenuptial agreement can be contested in a divorce proceeding. If your prenuptial agreement is valid, then it should be easily upheld in court. On the other hand, poorly-composed prenuptial agreements can be found invalid by a family court judge.

A second review of a prenuptial agreement may reveal a host of major errors in the document that, under New York state legislation, would render the whole prenuptial agreement useless. Incomplete or false information in the document can be utilized as grounds for asking that a prenuptial agreement be invalidated.

A well informed prenuptial attorney in Long Island is not likely to make such gross errors when drafting your prenuptial agreement. Decades of experience with prenuptial agreements in both drafting and litigating the agreements in family court collaboratively contribute to legal expertise.

Put more concisely, a prenuptial agreement written by an attorney should have the built-in validity necessary to hold up in a court of law.

Of course, people contesting a prenuptial agreement may be able to do this successfully even when an attorney wrote up the original document. In cases like these, the duty an attorney can perform would be to review the agreement. If flaws are discovered, then the attorney can argue the document fails the validity test in Long Island.

Discuss Your Prenuptial Agreement with Counsel

Long Islanders with questions about prenuptial agreements would be wise to direct their questions towards a prenuptial attorney who is capable of providing answers. In the first place, bringing in an experienced prenuptial attorney to draft the agreement would be a wise move as well.  If your agreement is already in place, then your attorney can review it at any point in time.