Prenuptial Agreement

Arizona Prenuptial Agreement (Prenup)

It is not uncommon for couples to seek a Prenuptial Agreement in Arizona. We prepare about 3 or 4 per week.

In a nutshell, the Prenuptial Agreement documents any assets and debts that the couple would like to document.

The most common reason for a Prenuptial Agreement is to list assets. For example, someone may want to document that they had a certain amount of money in an investment account, before they married their spouse. Meaning, they don’t want the investment account to be “up for grabs” in the case of a divorce.

Other times, people want to document specific debt. For example, Party B acknowledges that they have $25,000 in student loans which is their own separate responsibility.

A Prenuptial Agreement can be also be used for special clauses. A common special clause is that both parties agree that no alimony (spousal maintenance) shall be paid.

The State of Arizona has chosen to adopt the Uniform Premarital Agreement Act (UPAA), a statute created for the purpose of standardizing the requirements of prenuptial agreements between states.

As such, the Agreement we draft will be worded based on the notion subscribed to by the UPAA that prenuptial agreements should be “entered into voluntarily and fairly upon the exchange of disclosure between the Parties.”

There’s a big misconception that prenuptial agreements are only for the very wealthy, and quite the contrary, many of my clients come to me seeking prenuptial agreements to help them sort through and pretty much pre-plan what’s going to happen in the event of a divorce.

Many people wonder if they have to have significant assets or income to enter into a premarital agreement and the answer is a resounding “No!”

Prenuptial agreements are for individuals who want to have more control on how their assets and income are ultimately allocated in the event of a divorce. Prenuptial agreements can be as complicated or as simple as the clients would like them to be.

It’s not uncommon to prepare a “Prenup” with 30 pages, but we also prepare prenups with only one clause: Someone just wants to keep their house as separation property.

We will often get individuals who are more established in their lives who have assets that they want to protect. This is likely because many people are tending to get married later on in life.  Women no longer depend on men for their incomes, so many women come to the marriage with assets already. (Rather than having her father provide her new spouse a certain number of goats.)

Individuals that have significant assets and income that they want to protect, certainly don’t want to leave it to the court system as to what happens in the event of a divorce. We often prepare a prenuptial agreement is for individuals who have taken time to build their estates and to build themselves as professionals.

On the other hand, we also prepare for a fair number of individuals who own their own businesses.  For those clients, this is planning on how to preserve their business assets.

Of course, sometimes clients hire because they have been married before and they see the result of going through a divorce. They want to preserve their assets, and they don’t want to have a court making decisions because perhaps they’ve had a negative experience in the past.

We treat premarital agreements like marital settlement agreements– meaning, we take them seriously, and make sure they are detailed.

We think it’s really important for people to understand that as much time as it goes into drafting a marital settlement agreement in the Arizona divorce process– the same amount of time and attention needs to be done when drafting a premarital agreement.