Reply to Protecting money you gift adult kids for a house

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "Protecting money you gift adult kids for a house"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I find this thread eye-opening. I did not grow up with trust funds nor do I have any for my kids or anything like that, but [b]I don't get this hostility [/b]to pre-nups at all. Are you all very young? Have you not started to see acrimonious divorces in your social circles? I'm happily married for many years now, but I don't kid myself that the people who I see going through terrible divorces (or, in some cases, putting up with appalling behavior from spouses) were just dumber than me when it came to marriage. There's an element of luck in long-term marriage that I think people just want to pretend doesn't exist. I have a great spouse, but when I look at my divorcing contemporaries, they had the same thing when they got married too. (And yes, I know that the 50% divorce number doesn't apply to college-educated, blah blah blah, but even a 20% number is high: that's a 1 in 5 number, it's just not the rarity people want to pretend.)

I'm no family lawyer, but it seems to be obvious to me that marriage is both a romantic and familial relationship [i]and[/i] a legal contract. You can take control and draft your own version of the legal contract, or you can rely on the state's default legal contract. The default legal contract is messy, unpredictable, changes depending on the judge you get, and may contain terms that you'd personally find abhorrent. You can use it if you'd like; if you get married without a pre-nup, that's exactly what you're doing. Or, you can think carefully about things before you go into marriage, and draft up a legal contract that reflects your own values. If you don't want to participate in the legal contract aspect, you can stay in a long-term relationship without actually getting married.

I don't have a pre-nup. It wasn't something that was on my radar at the time of marriage; I didn't even know they existed. However, from my vantage point now, I view it as akin to pre-marital counseling. IMO if discussing a pre-nup is too uncomfortable, maybe you shouldn't be getting married to begin with. [/quote]

I am not sure where you are getting the hostility from.

Some posters disagree with prenups and others agree with them.

It's a discussion.

[/quote]

By hostility I mean opposition to them, which I definitely see on this thread. If you disagree with pre-nups, you are hostile to them, in other words, at least for yourselves if not for others. If you prefer, you can replace hostility with opposition in that sentence: I do not get the opposition to pre-nups at all. If a couple isn't willing to have an honest and frank discussion of how they're about to enter into a legal relationship as well as a familial and romantic relationship, maybe they aren't ready to get married.[/quote]

You don't get it because you don't want to get it. There's no need to play coy about it. It's like saying you don't get how someone could be "hostile" to the idea of eating cheese. You don't have to agree with it, but don't pretend it's because it just hasn't been explained to you enough. [/quote]

Okay. Do you have something more substantive to respond with? Are you willing to discuss the actual issues I raised in my post?[/quote]

You aren't actually raising any issues, so there's no need for the faux intellectualism. There've been several pages of discussion regarding how plenty of people view a marriage as a union of people and finances, and are abhorred at the idea of "shielding assets" like one's partner was some kind of pirate waiting to get his or her hands on your precious, precious funds. If you don't get that, that's fine. Your values are different.[/quote]

I don't have a pre-nup so my partner has full access to anything I have. I don't have trust funds either or any funds to shield from a partner. However, by issues I raised, I mean the fact that the numbers for divorce are high, no matter what people think. That there's an element of luck in choosing a partner that a lot of people seem to want to ignore. That marriage is a legal contract no matter how hard you pretend otherwise. That perhaps if you can't talk about and acknowledge the facts surrounding marriage, maybe your marriage isn't going to be so strong.

That having been said, the hostility (and by this I mean active hostility, not just opposition to the idea) in yours and PPs responses does give me an idea why there are so many divorces. Like I said, I find the thread eye-opening. [/quote]

Not this PP, but the other one.

I am still not sure about this hostility you mention.  :mrgreen:

I am not sure why you keep insisting that people cannot talk about the facts surrounding marriage. They have in this very thread.

Marriage is risky for everyone. If there are couples who can put a dollar amount to all the risks involved, more grease to their elbows.

However, when prenups are discussed, at least on this thread, the only risks being considered are the financial risks to the wealthy. When you(figuratively) take this kind of tone into your marriage, you are implying that your partner has more to gain from marrying you than you do from marrying them. After all, your risks were mitigated in a prenup and theirs wasn't. And this implication is not necessarily true. Furthermore, it can create a sense of suspicion and feelings of being undervalued in a marriage.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics