Some marriage counsellors in the US say postnuptial agreements can actually help ease tension as couples’ fortunes grow and keep them out of divorce courts.
NEW YORK: Postnups, like prenups, aren’t everybody’s idea of romance. But some marriage counsellors in the US say postnuptial agreements can actually help ease tension as couples’ fortunes grow and keep them out of divorce courts.
“Some couples marry straight out of college. As the years go by they can’t stand the way a spouse runs riot with family money. Instead of bickering about “your money, my money” they take the sting out of their marriage by making the financial terms of their union explicit,” says William Millman, a family lawyer who has been writing these contracts for the past three years.
“Postnups” are similar in function to prenuptial contracts on how to divide marital assets, except they are signed during a marriage, not before. “A postnup protects personal and business assets amassed both prior to and during marriage,” said Millman. “It protects art, assets, family heirlooms and inheritances that you might want to leave for your children or other family members.”
More hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers are doing postnups to safeguard their fat bonuses, shares and Hampton mansions in case they face a messy divorce. It would be a trifle cold-blooded even for Wall Street to mandate postnups, but hedge fund partners nudge one another to sign them, to protect the firm’s records from being pawed through by an angry spouse’s lawyer.
“I have represented people in hedge funds who are seeking to enter these contracts. It is becoming more common, particularly, as hedge fund people are concerned about divorces sort of going into and doing the investigation of the hedge fund and finding out private information,” Patricia Ferrari, a partner in the New York office of Fox Roths-child LLP, told DNA.
“They want to be careful that somebody is not going to the hedge fund to value a partner’s share and make any claims on the fund,” added Ferrari, who now writes at least five postnups a year for hedge fund managers, up from none in the late 1990s. However, she acknowledges that postnups turn the romantic idea of marriage on its head making the spouse “the outsider” while the husband shares a “secret close bond” with his business partners and drinking buddies.
“You might ordinarily have the husband and wife being the close family unit against the rest of the world. Now you have a situation in which the husband and his business partners have the close circle and the wives are on the outside — being kept at a distance about information and sharing of assets,” says Ferrari.
Arlene G Dubin, a New York attorney and author of Prenups for Lovers, told BusinessWeek that while drawing up postnups, “People ask for bad boy/bad girl clauses: If the husband or wife has an affair, drinks, smokes, gains weight, they get more or less money during the marriage.”
It may all sound like pretty cold-blooded stuff but postnups are soaring in popularity. And, firms like ProLegalForms.com are cashing in on the boom by helping spouses download standard postnuptial agreements for $24.95.
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