1 Answer

I see this question has been avoided for two weeks.  Here goes.....

Going from personal experience, I may not have needed the prenup, but there are some precautions I should have taken to protect myself financially.  I don't know that a prenup is needed if the couple maintain separate bank accounts for money that is earned separately.  I have a number of investments that my parents made for me when I was a child and receive dividends and reinvested shares.  I stupidly deposited those dividends to a joint account throughout the marriage.  Those should have gone to a personal account and been solely for my own use.  That may sound selfish, but there were circumstances that make hindsight 20-20 on this.

My parents also contributed alot to our marriage.  The contributions should have been in my name only and should have gone into my separate account that I didn't have.  Anything I wanted to share could have been transferred to the joint account.  We even bought a home through my parents.  The deed should have just had my name on it (again for reasons I won't go into here).

Had my ex-husband been left to support our little family of 5, we would have been starving and homeless.  He seriously didn't secure a "real job" for nearly 15 years. 

When we divorced, he was decent enough to leave the investments to me, but I had to buy him out of the property we owned (that my parents had basically GIVEN).  When I sold the property a few years ago, there was a huge loan that had to be repaid from the proceeds.  That loan was something he had given to a "friend" and the "friend" dragged his feet in paying it back, where he was only paying the interest and not the principal that was the agreement.  The "friend" lives in a beautiful new home that I have never been invited to visit. 

I am actually not really worried about all that anymore, but I should have handled the finances much more carefully and not trusted him as completely as I did. 

Oh, to answer you question.....it depends.  I don't know that it would have helped me more than just being smarter about finances and taking care of my own business instead of trusting him. I don't really buy into "What's mine is yours."  People need to keep some things separate, but I believe they should jointly support their home and family in whatever equitable way they establish.