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Chapter 1: What misconceptions exist about prenups?
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Hi, Rima and team. This is Alina calling from Seattle. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. I don't know exactly when I started listening, but I know the first episode that I remember is the one called Divorce Story because it was a way that my partner, now wife, and I were able to have more open conversations about prenups. I particularly knew I wanted one because...
I had my own business that I started years before we got married, and I knew that I wanted to protect it. And that podcast was something that we both listened to, and it helped us open up the conversation.
I'm Rima Grace, and welcome to This is Uncomfortable. Alina is talking about an episode we did back in 2020 about divorce and how it helped her and her partner talk openly about prenups. She called our hotline to share her thoughts, which you can also do, by the way. The number is 347-RING-TIU.
We've told a lot of stories over the years about money and relationships, and prenups is one of those topics I've been wanting to come back to and dig into a little more. Back when I got married, I knew very little about prenups. They just weren't something people around me really talked about, felt kind of taboo. But these days, it feels different.
About 15% of Americans apparently have a prenup, and nearly half say they'd be open to signing one, especially Gen Z and millennials. So this week, we're talking prenups, the misconceptions, how they actually work, and the bigger questions they bring up about love and power.
I'm chatting with two people who see couples at some of their most intimate crossroads, family lawyer Sahar Taylor and financial therapist Aja Evans. Sahar and Aja, welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. Hi, thank you for having us. So excited. Okay, so I want to start by playing this clip from the Bravo reality show Vanderpump Rules.
The show follows the dramatic lives of restaurant staff in West Hollywood. And there's this moment from the show that I always think about when the subject of prenups comes up. In this scene, Katie and her fiance, Tom, sit down with a lawyer to talk about getting a prenup.
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Chapter 2: How can a prenup protect against debt?
One of my best friends is actually going to be getting engaged soon and getting married, and I told her she should not get a prenup. Oh, that's interesting. Why'd you say that? Because, I mean, she's marrying an extremely wealthy person and they're getting married in California. Now, granted, the state that you get divorced, that's where the laws will be ruling your divorce.
But if you're marrying someone that's extremely well off, why would you want anything on paper? Go with what the state is going to say. And in California, you're going to get half.
So you think she would get more if they got divorced than if they did a contract?
Yeah. Yes, because if they do a contract, then his lawyer is going to tell him, hey, you should not give her as much because he has so much money. So I wouldn't advise every single person to get a prenup. Do you have a prenup? If you're marrying... I have a prenup. I have a prenup. Yeah. We negotiated like three, four months for the prenup. I mean, it was brutal.
And I was doing everything I could, let me tell you, negotiation-wise. And you're a lawyer. Is he a lawyer? I love this. No, he's in finance. Wait, what did that look like? We would be having dinner and I'd say, hey, your lawyer sent over these weird provisions today. Like, why don't you and I try to come to terms with something? And he would be like, shut up. Like, stop.
Were you the one who brought it up, wanting a prenup?
I mean, I think we both wanted it. I've believed in prenups from the beginning, so it's something I talk about even when I was single. When I would go on dates, I would tell people, hey, this is just how I run my life. This is what I believe in. I'm also a family law attorney, so I think it would be weird if I didn't have one. Right.
And there's just so many different provisions that I wanted, especially if I'm someone who has a successful career and has this education. But if you want me to be a stay-at-home mom, I need some type of protection around it. I think carrying a child is a very big deal. I need some type of protection around it.
So those are some of the provisions that you say exactly. Yep. If you feel comfortable sharing.
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Chapter 3: What emotional conversations do prenups initiate?
Like, I'm not doing that. I'm going to kill her. I'm going to kill...
I think that like my brain doesn't go there, my optimistic brain. I'm like, no.
I think I'm just, I'm a lawyer. I have to just think negatively. The whole field of law is to think about when things go wrong. So I don't, and I used to do corporate law before this. You don't hire a lawyer for the good times. You hire the lawyer to protect for the bad times. So my brain only thinks about things that could go wrong. Yeah.
Right. That makes sense.
And it's better to be proactive about it versus like what ends up happening is that people come to me after and they're like, I just didn't know. I feel so bad. I made this huge mistake. I wish I would have, could have, would have, should have kind of thing. And they feel awful about it.
So to your point and kind of your sharing, yes, it's pretty bad when you're going back and forth and just trying to figure it out. It's really uncomfortable. Yeah. But at the end, like it's all taken care of. You don't have to worry about it. And the amount of stories that I hear about people whose spouses, you know, whatever happened, they were sick and it changed their attitude or their mood.
So they did something different. They wrote people out of the will. They wrote kids out of the will. Oh, wow. I had a client, this isn't well-related, but this man was cheating on her for a long time. So they decided in the marriage that they're going to go to a therapist so that he can deal with his sex addiction or whatever it was. Why does he start having an affair with the therapist?
No, stop.
Terrible.
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Chapter 4: How do you start a conversation about prenups with your partner?
Yes. I've had a few couples who have come to me when they are trying to navigate prenup conversations and the contract itself or right before the contract. What's happened for me is that they are coming because their families are pretty much telling them that they need to have prenups. So it may not even be that they as a couple decided that they wanted to get
a prenup together, but their families were more so dictating that they needed a prenup. And our work was really about making sure that they were maintaining communication that like while they were going through the proceedings and getting it done, that they felt still united as a couple, that they felt like, hey, this is a positive thing. Yeah, we have some agency. We're centering our marriage.
We're centering our love, even though we're going through this process because other people wanted us to go through it.
I'm curious to hear from both of y'all. So both of y'all have worked with couples on prenups in different ways, right, as a therapist and as a lawyer. What's coming up for folks when there's like discord between them?
American culture is very, I mean, think about like WASP culture. It's very understated. You don't talk about money. It's very, it's icky to bring it up. People are scared to dive in. And then when the conversation gets rolling, that's when they're like, oh, wait, actually, I don't like that. No, no, actually, I do want that. It's like Pandora's box.
They don't want to open it because I think they know once they open it, They're going to have to have a lot of hard conversations with one another. And when you're in love, you just want to live in this bliss of like there's never going to be any issues. Nothing's going to come up, blah, blah, blah.
But I also think that to our point earlier, prenups have this idea behind it that says that you're coming from wealth. And people don't always want to tell everybody that they're wealthy. People don't want to tell each other that they're wealthy. The amount of couples who enter into marriage not knowing how much debt or how much the other person makes is large.
I'm sure there's so many married couples who still don't know that.
Yes, yes. You're like, yes, believe me, I know.
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Chapter 5: What are common provisions to include in a prenup?
It depends on who you hire, how long this goes. But I mean, you're looking at, if you go to a good attorney, you're looking at somewhere between $20,000 to $30,000.
To get a prenup? No. Yeah, I mean, you can find a cheaper one.
You can find one for like $5,000 to $10,000.
Yeah, and I think there are all these services now where you can do it online, right? And it can be much cheaper.
Yeah, but the thing is, if you're, let's say you're a businessman, you need a lawyer who also brings in a tax advisor, who brings in, let's say, a trust advisor, a wills advisor. It depends how much you have in your life. Obviously, two people who have like a car and a dog between them don't need to pay $20,000 unless someone is going to be like the next Leonardo DiCaprio tomorrow, right?
But if you're someone who, let's say like a Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey, no, they need like, there's going to be so many people on that team because you're looking at entertainment. You're looking at wills. You're looking at trust. You have to look into the future. And even doing that is a very difficult job. And that takes a very long time because you don't know what the future can hold.
So you have to kind of play fortune teller and also address those things.
Man, so I'm sure it brings up all these strange clauses too, right? I'm curious, what are some of the wildest provisions you've put into a prenup or worked on with couples?
Payouts per child. So some women will be like, I want to pay out for every child I have. I want X amount of dollars. There's clauses in there about embryos. Some people do IVF. And so who gets the embryos in the event of a divorce? So I might hate you, but I might still want the embryos to be made into children and have them be born. Do I need to get the other person's permission?
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Chapter 6: How can couples stay connected during prenup negotiations?
And the other person saying, I don't care how long you stay. I don't want to give you any of this. It's a little bit, I mean, it's adversarial, right? That's why you have two people who are represented by other people. So it's not always just like from my perspective, lovey-dovey.
Sure. Well, do you see any patterns in terms of like who tends to be the person who's like saying, hey, I want to, I want more?
Yeah, I mean, listen, typically you see an imbalance in earnings. So when the couple comes, there's always one person who earns substantially more than the other. It's very rare that you see two people who are equally making the same. Yeah. It's typically a very large disparity. And the person who is financially in a better position wants to keep most of it.
And the person who's not in the financially well position wants more of it. So it's just about who gets a piece of the pie and who's willing to fight for it. Yeah. So this is a perfect example of if you were in therapy, I'd be like, well, you knew that this person was in this position.
Like, what are you thinking marrying this person knowing they're going to be in this position, keeping them in this lifestyle and not expecting them to want to stay in that lifestyle if? You got divorced. So I think like while it might start off at sunshine and rainbows, like it depends on the kind of therapist you're getting.
I'm a little sassy, so I don't mind saying that to a client and being like, well, come on. Like, obviously, this is your lifestyle. Your spouse is going to want to stay in that lifestyle. Your spouse may want to keep the children navigating to homes. in the same lifestyle, right?
So how do we have that real conversation of you want them, you're okay with them, but then all of a sudden if something changes, you're not willing to give. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Let's talk about that.
Right, right. I mean, it's interesting because I feel like power is the subtext, right? It's like, at the heart of it, you're really talking about who has leverage, like who can walk away or who has family wealth or who could pause their career. And so...
I guess that going back to like why we were talking about how they can be so uncomfortable, it's like it surfaces a lot of those imbalanced power dynamics.
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Chapter 7: Do prenups actually help couples communicate better?
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All right. We'll catch y'all next week.