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Getting married should be one of the happiest times of your life, and there's no reason why being prudent about your financial future should stand in the way of wedded bliss. Sensible couples, whose critical faculties are not temporarily disabled by love, plan for the fact that almost one in two marriages in Great Britain will end in divorce (we have the highest divorce rate in Europe).
Even if you believe that your marriage won't be one of them, would you even think twice about taking out an insurance policy against the extremely remote chance of your house burning to the ground or your car being written off? Yet divorcing without a prenup, which has the same odds as flipping a coin, could prove a bigger financial disaster than both your house burning to the ground and your car being written off on the same day without insurance!
In a 2006 study, Heather Mahar of Harvard Law School spent the previous year trying to understand why more couples don't get prenuptial agreements. Her study, which she's submitted for publication in several journals, confirmed her suspicions: People are falsely optimistic about the success of their marriages, and they fear that requesting a prenuptial agreement would signal uncertainty about a marriage.
Mahar found that although respondents to her survey correctly identified the national divorce rate at close to 50 percent, they believed their own chance of divorcing was just 11.7 percent. The more optimistic a respondent was about the enduring success of his or her marriage, the less likely he or she was to consider requesting a prenuptial agreement. "Just like everyone thinks they're a better-than-average driver, everyone thinks that there's no way their marriage will end in divorce," says Mahar.
In 2003, the case of K -v- K changed the way the English courts view prenuptial agreements. A wealthy property developer married his pregnant girlfriend, with both signing a prenup the day before the wedding. The relationship ended within the year, and the wife launched a multi-million pound claim on his assets. However, their prenuptial agreement was upheld, saving the husband millions of pounds.
Previously most judicial decisions did not favour prenups on grounds of public policy. But this is now changing and most Family Law specialists now believe prenuptial agreements will become fully legally binding in the UK (as postnups are) after the recent spate of high-profile divorce cases that supported prenups, and others that raised the amount that high earners have to pay to their former spouses. There has also been increasing pressure from Europe, where prenups have been binding for years, and also from the Solicitors Family Law Association, which takes the view that adults should be entitled to regulate their finances as they choose without interference form the courts.
Agreements.co.uk recommeds that, for maximum financial protection, a couple should take out a pre-nuptial agreement immediately prior to marriage and then update it to a post-nuptial agreement whilst married, thereby sending out the clearest message that both partners wish their respective finances to be dealt with separately.
The Government has already signalled its willingness to boost the legal status of prenuptial agreements, and the courts are now falling into line with public opinion and are making judgments in favour of prenups. Provided your prenuptial agreement is fair and reasonable in all the circumstances then there is no reason why the wishes of the couple, as expressed in the agreement, should not be followed.
Then there was the Parlour case in which the wife of Ray Parlour, the former Arsenal striker, appealed against a divorce settlement that many might have considered generous. The upshot of her successful appeal struck fear into the hearts of the asset-rich across England. Not only was she entitled to enough cash to meet her needs, she was also entitled to a share of Mr. Parlour's future earnings for the following four years, now based no longer on the ex-spouse's needs or current lifestyle, but on the size of the available assets.
Such decisions led to a flood of enquiries at Agreements.co.uk, prompting us to launch two separate divisions, PrenuptialAgreements.co.uk and PostnuptialAgreements.co.uk, involved exclusively in the drafting of prenuptial and postnuptial agreements. Our agreements aren't for the super rich, but for ordinary people with good jobs, their own flat or house and some savings tucked away. We now produce more prenuptial and postnuptial agreements than any other, and continue our policy of offering these agrements at around one third of the cost of most family law solicitors.
Just out of interest, here are some of the more notable divorce settlements
(who weren't clients):
| Paloma Picasso and Rafael Lopez-Cambil, 1999 | £250m |
| Aga Khan and Sally Croker-Poole, 1995 | £30m |
| Phil Collins, singer, and Jill, 1994 | £25m |
| Prince and Princess of Wales, 1996 | £17.5m |
| Terence Conran, designer, and Caroline, 1996 | £10.5m |
| Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, 1999 | £10m |
| and abroad: | |
| Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, and Phyllis, 2002 | £1 billion |
| Adnan Khashoggi, former arms dealer, and Soraya, 1982 | £500m |
| Michael Jordan, basketball player, and Juanita, 2003 | £135m |
| Jack Welch of GE and Jane, 2003 | £100m |
| Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving, 1989 | £70m |
If you would like to further information on what's involved in having a prenup or a postnup, click on CONTACT at www.PrenuptialAgreements.co.uk or www.PostnuptialAgreements.co.uk.
