These days it’s not just the rich and famous who are taking out pre-nups. More of us are deciding it makes sense to have a legal agreement that sets out what happens to the money if the marriage ends. Younger couples particularly likely to sign one, even when there aren’t great wealth differences to consider.
In the US, where divorce courts have always tended to uphold the agreements, more than half of engaged or married Americans under 45 have a prenup. Overall, round one in five married couples has a prenup in the US.
Following a legal shift in England towards greater recognition of prenuptial agreements, one in ten couples have one. Here too it is younger couples leading the way, with around one in three married under-35-year-olds having signed a pre-nup.
Lawyers say the motivation for pre-nups is a desire to avoid repeating the pain of a previous separation, or witnessing the messy splits that they saw their parents go through.
But prenups have also become much more accessible with the rise of online platforms that make it faster and cheaper.
Couples are also getting married later: they may have some [university] debt, maybe started a business or purchased a home. So you have a lot to protect and to lose by the age of 34.
What’s become known as “the Great Wealth Transfer” means some members of the younger generation are receiving huge assets to manage. It is often their parents who are the driving force behind ring-fencing those inheritances.
And while in the past pre-nups have been criticised for limiting women’s rights, they have evolved and now benefit women by giving them the chance to clarify their rights from the start. And it gets the hard conversations out of the way before the marriage begins.