If you’ve taken the time and money to prepare a Minnesota prenuptial agreement, you want to make sure it lasts.
After all, why go through the hassle of laying out your plans on paper just to have the prenup tossed out of court. To ensure that your prenuptial agreement will withstand the test of time, keep the following issues in mind when drawing it up.
MN Prenuptial Agreements | Beware accusations of duress
Among the most common reasons people give when challenging the validity of a prenuptial agreement is that they felt forced into signing. The party challenging the prenup often claims that they had reservations about signing, but were pressured into agreeing. This pressure is also known as duress and can prove fatal to a prenup if found to be true. The good news is that it is actually fairly difficult for a person to demonstrate duress. To do so, the person would need to show that they truly had no choice but to sign the agreement, not simply that they felt a bit of insistence from the other party. Thankfully, small things like feel pushed around by family expectations or the stress of a rapidly approaching wedding are almost never found to amount to actual duress.
MN Prenuptial Agreements |Disclose everything
One of the things that can trip up enforcing an otherwise good prenup is when it is discovered that important information was either wrong or left out entirely. For instance, if your spouse signed an agreement that did not accurately reflect your financial situation, this kind of discrepancy can, under the right circumstances, be deemed fraud. If you are found to have knowingly hid assets or lied while drawing up the prenuptial documents, you run the risk of having the entire document thrown out. As a result, when drafting your prenup be sure to disclose everything. When in doubt, disclose. After all, you don’t want it to come back and haunt you later on.
MN Prenuptial Agreements | Secure independent counsel
It is absolutely essential that both parties to a prenuptial agreement have their own lawyers review and offer advice on the agreement. What can sometimes occur is that one party, often the one with the money worth protecting, draws up the agreement and simply asks the soon-to-be-spouse to sign. While this may seem fine and dandy at first, it opens the door to accusations later on that the person was denied independent legal representation.
Before a person can be said to have voluntarily signed such an important document, it is crucial that they understand it. By hiring separate attorneys for each party, you can ensure that no arguments are made later that they did not understand what was happening or that they felt hustled by your lawyers.
MN Prenuptial Agreements | Avoid including crazy provisions
Though prenups are versatile tools that can prove incredibly useful in the event of a divorce, it is important to understand that they don’t do everything. For instance, prenuptial agreements are not allowed to contain any provisions relating to children. That means no hammering out potential custody or child support arrangements. Any attempt to do so will be deemed a violation of public policy and found unenforceable.
Same thing with certain crazy provisions, like those requiring a certain amount of sexual relations or specific weight limits for the parties. Courts will not put themselves in the position of having to put parties to a lawsuit on a scale. Instead, judges will simply deem the provisions and, depending on the facts of the case, potentially the entire prenuptial agreement, unenforceable.
Minnesota Prenuptial Agreement Attorney and Lawyer
An experienced Minnesota family law attorney can help walk you through the difficult process of divorce, including offering advice on confusing financial issues such as alimony and helping negotiate emotional subjects like child custody arrangements. For more information on divorce in Minnesota, along with a variety of other topics, contact Joseph M. Flanders of Flanders Law Firm at (612) 424-0398.
Source: “10 Common Prenup Pitfalls,” published at HuffingtonPost.com.
