Chapter 1: Why are more young people considering prenups?
My mother was surprised that we were getting a prenup. She didn't, in her mind, it wasn't something that, you know, people like us got, like people of our income range would be getting. She's like, it's for the billionaires. It's the daddy war bucks, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So she was like, what are you doing?
I don't understand. Parents famously just don't understand. But here at Today Explained, we have also been wondering what's going on with prenups. Data shows that many younger couples, so think Gen Z and millennials, are signing these agreements before they get married.
Even couples that make more or less the same amount of money come from similar financial backgrounds and don't have many assets to protect. So is romance dead or is it just evolving? Coming up, we ask, you tell.
I object!
I've been engaged before and it fell apart and after that I decided there's no way I would ever get married without some sort of financial agreement.
We do have a prenup. The point was just to sort of make sure that should we ever get separated or divorced, that what each of us came into the relationship with and what each of us may inherit in the future stays with the individual rather than becoming joint assets that get split.
After we were sort of engaged for a year, he sort of said, Nick, I need you to sign a prenup. And I was like, oh, OK. And I had come from a pretty wealthy family and he had worked really hard for his money. And I sort of thought, is it for me or for you? And so we went through it.
I never really thought about getting a prenup, but she really wanted one. She is worried that someday I would, you know, take her parents home or something like that.
My husband had been married previously and he went through a divorce, obviously. And I wanted to give him some assurances that, you know, if our marriage ever did dissolve, that he wouldn't be left in a lurch because I was angry and bitter at him.
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Chapter 2: What factors influence the decision to sign a prenup?
How long ago did you guys get married? So we got married back in December of 2024 on a Friday the 13th.
So did you know it was going to be the Friday the 13th or was it like, oh, this just happens to be the Friday when everyone can come?
No, we leaned in. We wanted it.
We wanted it to be Friday the 13th. For either of you, be honest, was there any doubt about getting married?
I didn't have any doubts, but I know that divorce is like a really common thing. And my husband had been married previously. And obviously, you know, he ended up getting a divorce. So, you know, I went in with both eyes open that, you know, no matter how happy things are, things can end.
You know, there was like some, you know, what ifs, but she's a good partner and I didn't foresee anything happening at least anytime soon. So, yeah, just kind of went with it.
You guys ultimately ended up signing a prenuptial agreement, a prenup.
Whose idea was it? It was mine. After my husband's divorce, you know, there's like a lot of financial stressors and it was a big legal headache for him that I knew had left him maybe a little gun shy. And so I wanted to let him know that I'm totally willing and able to sign a prenup.
It was already kind of in my mind, but the fact that she brought it up, that definitely helped.
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Chapter 3: How do prenups affect perceptions of romance?
What happened?
So a few different things. We bought a house together. So the house was kind of the biggest financial expense. Unfortunately and fortunately, home prices had grown since I purchased the house. So I had to end up getting a loan for half the equity of the house to pay her. So I ended up taking like a $140,000 loan out. There was separate alimony that I had to pay.
That was like an additional 25-ish thousand. And then there's this other separate debt that was also included. It was like another 20. So there's a huge, very large financial hit, I would say. There's a lot of, you know, okay, I don't want to go through this again kind of thing. Yeah. So definitely the prenup was important to me.
I'm going to ask you guys a personal question, okay?
Okay.
Are you guys rich? Does either one of you come from a ton of money? Like the classic prenup situation is somebody in this relationship is coming into it with a ton of money and somebody else is coming into it with much less.
Is there any imbalance here? I wouldn't say that there's a huge imbalance. And when we were growing up, neither of us came from a financially well-to-do background. And we both went to school. We developed our careers. And I would say we're doing pretty good now.
careers have given us stock options nothing crazy again a modest amount of money we both have 401ks that we've been saving into I've been saving into my 401k since I was working part-time jobs at grocery stores so we both have some assets Gregory is definitely the higher income earner in our relationship but I would say I'm not too far off
So when we get down to brass tacks, a prenup, as I understand it, says in the event of a divorce, I'm going to get this, you're going to get this. So what's in it? What are you guys actually agreeing to do or divvy up?
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Chapter 4: What unique clauses are appearing in modern prenups?
So I'm not going to recommend anybody set up a date by going over a prenup, like let's pop a bottle of champagne and, you know, break out the prenup. I don't think it's romantic in that sense at all, but it is romantic in its own way. You know, I... I saw what the stressors of the divorce had on Gregory.
And I know that he didn't go into his first marriage thinking that it was going to end in divorce. I don't think anybody goes into a marriage expecting it to end in divorce. But I wanted to let him know that I'm in it. You know, I'm not here for the money. I want to be with you because I love you, because I want to make a life with you and grow old with you and plan a future with you.
So I'll lay it all out here. Here's all the finances and let's sign this paperwork together.
That's Cara and Gregory in Florida. Thanks to them and thanks to all of you who called. Coming up, what is behind the rise in prenups?
Prenups is what brings us together today. Explained.
My name is Jennifer Wilson. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker.
What got you thinking and writing about prenups?
I just noticed them kind of, you know, all over. You know, you've seen prenups on TV shows like Sex and the City.
Well, this all looks pretty normal. Charlotte wasted no time having a lawyer look over the papers. Normal? We haven't even gotten married yet and already we're talking about divorce. Sweetie, a lot of people do prenups these days. Marriage is supposed to be about love and happiness. And the merging and protection of assets.
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Chapter 5: How does financial background impact prenup discussions?
Here's why Devin from Love is Blind should definitely take his fiancee, Virginia, up on her offer for a prenup.
What's crazy to me is God forbid somebody would want to protect themselves in case things go wrong. But you literally met this person three weeks ago. You're getting married to them on a show. Why would a prenup not make sense?
You know, and then all over TikTok, there were these personal finance influencers, often female. There's one who goes by the handle You're Rich BFF. Her name's Vivian Too. And she had a, you know, a viral video that said, What's in my prenup and in my purse? You know, it's like a sort of a very cutesy conversation about prenups.
And she got a lot of, you know, support from, you know, people online saying, yes, every woman should push for a prenup.
And that's the whole point of a prenup, making joint financial decisions that make sense for your relationship, because it's the most loving thing you can do.
And also just the numbers of people getting prenups have just risen dramatically. So there was a 2023 Harris poll that showed that 40% of millennials and Gen Zers claimed that they had signed a prenup. Now, that number struck a lot of the lawyers I spoke to as way too high, although they all told me that they have seen a big uptick in younger couples asking for prenups.
So I just wanted to dig into this phenomenon.
You have laid out what my understanding of a prenup always was, which is there's a rich guy. He's coming to the marriage with all the money. The woman has no or less money. And so the idea is basically like, I'm going to protect myself from this woman just in case. Very gendered scenario that I just laid out, but I also think rooted in some truth.
You said it was a woman on Love is Blind who was like, I want a prenup and she didn't have money. So what are the differences that we're seeing here?
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Chapter 6: What are common misconceptions about prenups?
You can sort of say $10,000, $20,000 per post. And I think that's because, you know, we've seen people's careers be affected by information about what happened in their relationship becoming public. So it's not totally irrational. Millennials are also getting married later. So things like IVF have come up. So Hello Prenup also has an embryo clause.
where you can decide how you want to, for instance, divide embryos in the event of a divorce and even like who's going to pay for, you know, storage fees. Even something like classic, classic clauses like the infidelity clause. You know, you have to be very particular about how you define infidelity these days. I mean, we're living in an era of, you know, ethical non-monogamy.
More people are thinking differently about what infidelity is. But also, you know, I interviewed for the piece a divorce lawyer who said that You know, relationships with an AI chatbot. Those could conceivably violate an infidelity clause. And she actually said that she's already telling her clients to be careful, you know, about how much, for instance, you even divulge to some of these chatbots.
Because she said you can actually subpoena those conversations and they can come up, you know, in a divorce, but also in custody. So, I mean, these prenups are definitely modernizing. But, you know, there have always been weird prenup clauses. I mean, the thing is, you can put anything in a prenup. You know, I spoke to a divorce attorney who had a couple...
And they wanted something in the prenup that there would be a financial penalty if their BMI went over a certain amount. And they both wanted it. And she said, look, no judge is going to enforce this. And they said, we don't care. We want the motivation.
I want to ask you about the question of inheritance because we've covered on this show before the great wealth transfer. You know what this is. Yes. It's like millennials and Gen Zers are going to inherit like trillions of dollars from their boomer parents over the next decade or 20 years. And I would imagine that...
The great wealth transfer and younger people expecting to get something from it actually may be juicing the prenup industry as well. It's like, I know that I'm inheriting an enormous amount of money and I want to kind of bulletproof myself. Do you see that playing into it at all?
Absolutely. And, you know, as much as the story was about, you know, why millennials and Gen Zers really want a prenup, the truth is that in a lot of cases, they're parents who are pushing them to get prenups. And I talked to a lawyer who teaches a class on divorce law at Columbia. She actually let me sit in for a portion of the class. And she said that, you know, she does a lot of prenups.
And she said sometimes she's in the middle of a conversation and she says, please just put your mother on. You can just tell this isn't coming from you. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How does the great wealth transfer influence prenup trends?
It means that you can hear that the divorce rate is 50%. But when someone says, and you and your partner, do you think you'll ever get divorced? You're going to say no. And that actually can impact marriage. what you get in a prenup, what you think that you want in a prenup, because you might agree to less favorable terms.
You might even ask for less favorable terms because you want to show your partner that you're not in it for the money. I do wonder sometimes, what does it mean to kind of go into the messiness of marriage, thinking so much about what's mine, what's yours?
I do wonder, like, how does that work on a day-to-day basis when you're living complicated lives and things go awry and life is so unpredictable? And I felt really often that The people I was interviewing know that, and they were almost using the prenup to create some certainty.
Jennifer Wilson is a staff writer with The New Yorker. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Jolie Myers and Jenny Lawton. It was engineered by Patrick Boyden, David Tadishore, and Andrea Lopez-Cruzado is our fact checker.
The rest of our team, Hadi Mouagdi, Miles Bryan, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Espudu, Dustin DeSoto, Ested Herndon, and Sean Ramos-Firm. Amina El-Sadi is a supervising editor and Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC.
It's part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, podcast.voxmedia.com for more. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
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