TAMPA PRE & POSTNUPTIAL AGREEMENT LAWYER PROTECTS YOUR FUTURE 

When you finally meet that person you love and want to spend the rest of your life with, you can only think about planning your big day and the rest of your life together. You might be thinking of buying your first home and starting your family. You’re probably not thinking about what will happen if the marriage doesn’t work out and you get a divorce.

But you should.

While it’s no longer true that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, the number still remains well over a third. If you do get divorced, you will have to divide your assets and your debts, which could lead to an acrimonious back-and-forth that draws out over months or even years. You could end up losing your quality of life because you no longer have the assets or the financial means you did while you were married.

A prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can help you create an equitable division of your property so that there is no risk of you losing valuable assets and so that you don’t have to put yourself through a rancorous divorce. Our Tampa prenuptial and postnuptial agreement lawyer creates the right agreement to protect your interests. Or, review an agreement that your partner’s lawyer has put together to ensure your best interests are protected. Working with a Tampa prenup lawyer from the Law Office of Mark G. Rodriguez helps you understand your legal rights and ensures your future is protected.

You may be more familiar with the idea of a prenuptial agreement, hearing about it in relation to high-profile celebrity marriages. For example, the prenup between singers Beyonce and Jay Z entitles Beyonce to $1 million for every year the couple is married. She gets an extra $5 million for each child she bears.

While the average couple might not be dealing with a million or billion dollar fortune, they can still benefit from a prenuptial agreement to make provisions for how their marital assets will be divided.

A prenuptial agreement is created and signed before a couple marries. It is recommended to create this agreement as soon as possible after getting engaged. Therefore, if any contention arises during the negotiations, it does not create any problems that would cast a pall over the wedding proceedings.

A postnuptial agreement can be created at any time after the marriage has already taken place. While many lawyers agree that having a postnuptial agreement in place is better than having no agreement at all, most encourage getting a prenuptial agreement instead. The reason is that not all states recognized a postnuptial agreement (Florida does) and that creating a postnuptial agreement can be more emotionally charged, since they are usually prompted by problems that arise in the marriage.

As soon as you become engaged, you should call a pre and postnuptial agreement lawyer in Tampa to help you put together an agreement that will protect your rights and your financial future. By calling a lawyer early in the process, you can work out an arrangement that protects your interests without feeling pressured by the timeline of wedding planning.

The general guidelines for creating a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement are the same: They have to be fair to both parties, and they have to be in writing and signed.

Your partner may tell you when you get married that he’d let you keep the house in the event of a divorce so that you could raise the kids in their childhood home, but tempers can flare and hearts may change after the marriage comes to an end. A judge won’t be swayed by reports that your partner promised you the house. Only a signed prenuptial or postnuptial agreement will confirm that arrangement. Otherwise, you’ll have to fight it out in divorce court.

Pre and postnuptial agreements can create a clear division of finances, assets and debts in the event of a divorce, including things that you or your partner owned before you were married. For example, if your grandmother left you her beautiful home in your will and you moved into it as a married couple, it becomes marital property. Your spouse can lay claim to that home unless you worked out ownership in your pre or postnuptial agreement.

Pre and postnuptial agreements can even establish certain expectations for the marriage –even if it does not end in divorce. For example, they can establish a monthly budget for your household, or they can create guidelines for how much time you spend with each other versus on hobbies, friends and other interests.

Prenuptial and postnuptial agreements cannot include a waiver of child support or determine child custody. They also cannot disproportionately favor one spouse while dispossessing the other. For example, a prenup can’t say that a woman with no means who marries a millionaire will get nothing if they are divorced.

Creating prenuptial and postnuptial agreements must be fair to both parties and must based on full disclosure of all assets and obligations. Our Tampa law attorney helps you create a fair and legally binding agreement that will hold up to scrutiny in the event of your divorce. You won’t have to worry about yet another fight or negotiation — you can rest easy knowing that the prenuptial or postnuptial agreement created by a skilled family law attorney from the Law Office of Mark G. Rodriguez will be unambiguous and legally binding.

We also help you review documents put together by your partner’s attorney to ensure that the agreement is fair to you and protects your interests. We explain your legal rights and will highlight issues you may not have thought of when coming up with the agreement.