subject: Your UK Prenuptial Agreement - Good Reason To Get It Right [print this page] Your UK Prenuptial Agreement - Good Reason To Get It Right
Deciding on whether or not to make a prenuptial agreement (or 'prenup') can be stressful and is often avoided by loved up couples planning their wedding. However making a prenup should actually be considered alongside the decision on whether or not to get married.However in choosing to follow the sensible route to looking after your future - whatever the outcome of your forthcoming marriage - creating an agreement like this should be done with due care and attention. Even though a quick note of what you think you woul like to happen in the event of the divorce might give you some temporary peace of mind, this is unlikely to protect you in the future. You need to bear in mind that Courts in the UK do not legally enforce prenuptial agreements, although they do carry increasing weight especially after the recent case involving Karen Radmacher, the German heiress. It is perhaps more helpful to look at the alternative. Without having a prenuptial agreement in the UK in place, court awards on a divorce settlement can appear, to some, to be a lottery. Unfortuately approximately a half of all marriages will end up with a divorce in the UK. Particularly in the case of wealthy parties, the court will then start by looking at a 50-50 share out of your property and assets. There is a chance that this could be fair and equitable, however there is also a chance that one party could be considerably more wealthy than the other and therefore this division is completely unfair. Therefore the potential danger for wealthy individuals without a prenuptial agreement in the UK is that they could lose half of their assets - even more - should they divorce. This can very easily mean houses and family property having to be sold to finance such a settlement and, particularly when the relationship has only been of s short duration, the financial loss can be very extreme. The good news is that a properly drafted UK prenuptial agreement does go a long way to easing the uncertainty of how a UK court will look at your affairs. For an increasing number of folk making a UK prenup, the motto is 'once bitten, twice shy'. You might have experienced a divorce in the past and had your property unfairly taken away from you. Therefore you will not want to risk the same things happening again however happy you are with your new relationship. By using a prenuptial agreement you can gain the peace of mind from knowing that any damage to your property in the future will not be as painful.
