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How The Court Determines The Enforceability Of Your Prenuptial Contract

Posted On : Nov-01-2011 | seen (610) times | Article Word Count : 519 |

When you finally met the person that you would want to spend the rest of life with, legal matters will be the last thing on your mind.
When you finally met the person that you would want to spend the rest of life with, legal matters will be the last thing on your mind. Most of the times, people who plan to get married never think about getting a divorce. However, statistics say so otherwise.

Although you might not want to think about it or no matter how much you try to avoid talking about this topic, a divorce in every marriage is most likely to happen than not. Now, you need to be practical and protect yourself even before you get yourself into a marriage. A prenuptial agreement is a legal and binding contract that states all of your assets and your future spouse’s assets.

This enables both of you to put protect your current assets from being shared legally to your future spouse. Though this may not sound romantic or so what most people think, a prenuptial agreement is very important. This leaves all of your financial expectations off the table before the marriage.

Courts from different states have their own set of guidelines and a number of criteria when deciding the enforceability of your prenuptial contract. You may want to consider checking out prenuptialagreements.org for more relevant information about this subject. But here are the basic guidelines on how judges scrutinize your prenuptial contract:

1. In the absence of deceit

2. Both parties signed voluntarily or without undue influence or with no duress

3. If there is a full disclosure of all the assets and all of your income when the contract was drafted

4. If the contract is fair or reasonable while the contract was drafted and during the divorce

5. If both the party understands what they signed for no matter if their legal counsel advised them otherwise

These are the most basic guidelines but it varies from one state to another. On top of that, state law regarding prenuptial agreement and divorce vary over time, they may change and may void the validity and the enforceability of your contract if this happens.

You should be very careful about where you look for information about the prenuptial contract as it can vary widely. You may want to research more about it and focus on your state as this is where you would probably be filing the contract anyway.

Division of Marital Assets during Divorce

Now, all properties acquired during marriage are called marital property. These may come in form of tangible and non-tangible properties, which includes bank accounts, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, automobiles, tools, books, house and more. This also includes your salary earned and inheritances during marriage. All these properties will be duly divided once divorce is filed. Judges usually dives the marital assets in half.

But those not covered under marital property will remain to be personal property as well as properties protected by the prenuptial contract. The prenuptial contract will not affect the fact that each spouse is to rightfully receive half of the marital assets.

Article Source : http://www.articleseen.com/Article_How The Court Determines The Enforceability Of Your Prenuptial Contract_98559.aspx

Author Resource :
You can visit www.prenuptialagreements.org, which is a website that provides free information about prenuptial agreement law from different states.

Keywords : www.prenuptialagreements.org,

Category : Business : Small Business

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