Many New Yorkers pursue higher education in order to achieve their dreams and to enter careers that they find fulfilling. Though jobs that require advanced degrees often provide individuals with higher than average compensation packages, they also often force individuals to incur heavy educational debts in order to become qualified for those professional roles. Medical degrees, law degrees and other post-college educational pursuits can be very expensive and can saddle young professionals with a lot of personal debt.
As a result, individuals can be as likely to bring significant debts into a marriage as they are to bring significant assets into a legal union. Though personal assets may be attractive in prospective partners, personal debts often are not. In order to avoid becoming responsible for some or all of a future spouse’s premarital debts, individuals may wish to enter into prenuptial agreements that stipulate the terms of their debt responsibility in the event that their marriages end in divorce.
Prenuptial agreements, also called prenups for short, can address the complicated financial matters many couples struggle to resolve when they decide to end their marriages. A prenup may state that the partners to a marriage will take with them any debts that they brought into their union or it may provide a debt-saddled partner with financial support from the other to help pay down those outstanding obligations.
Though the state has imposed rules on how prenups may be crafted and certain provisions within those documents may be found unconscionable by family law courts, individuals have a lot of freedom when it comes to settling their debt and financial matters in prenuptial agreements. Divorce and family law attorneys can provide useful assistance to their clients who are interested in establishing prenuptial agreements before they formalize their personal relationships.