So your spouse isn’t doing the dishes enough? Try a postnuptial agreement! They aren’t as silly as they might seem, writes Jacoba Urist, provided you do your homework before signing one.
If a married couple tells you that they’ve never fought over how much something costs or whose family to visit for the holidays, either their wedding was last week or they’re lying.
Most of us duke it out the old-fashioned way: in the middle of the store, with the salesperson standing off to one side pretending he can’t hear, or in a serious game of marital Ping-Pong in the weeks before the holiday season.
But what if you took an entirely different tack? What if, instead, you each hired a lawyer to work out exactly how to spend the family’s money, or even the details of your day-to-day activities? You get this much for golf gear; I get that much for home décor. Your parents for Thanksgiving; mine for Christmas Eve. In other words, it’s marriage by postnuptial agreement.
Sure, it might sound a little silly. After all, isn’t marriage about learning how to work out these kinks together? If you need legal counsel to help you agree on a new stereo or when to see the in-laws, maybe you just weren’t compatible in the first place. But according to some of the nation’s top divorce experts, a postnup can be a productive way of dealing with all sorts of practical and financial issues that often threaten the long-term viability of a union.
In fact, postnups are more popular now than ever, and not just with the super-rich or Hollywood types.
a leading divorce attorney in Washington, D.C., has seen it all: from couples who want to specify when, where, and how often they’ll be taking vacations, to who gets stuck with weeding and raking the backyard.