In some ways, I’m your typical engineer. I want to take things apart to understand them, then put them back together. Maybe that’s why I spent so much time researching divorce before I felt comfortable getting married.
After deep-diving into the California divorce process, my partner and I decided to use an online service called HelloPrenup. It seemed like the easiest and cheapest way for us to get a prenup, especially as our situation is not very complicated. We don’t own property, my “business” (this blog) makes no money, and neither of us have kids from a previous relationship. In fact, the current laws in our state suit us very well. However, if we were to move, or if the laws were to change, we want to have our own agreement in place.
Note: Some links in this article are affiliate links, meaning I may get a kickback at no extra expense to you.
Basic Prenup Breakdown
The main things we outlined for our prenup after spending some time talking about it:
- Premarital assets stay separate property, including growth.
- Everything else during the marriage is considered joint property.
- Debt belongs to the person who incurred it. (It’s important to note, though, that a prenup won’t always protect you from creditors)
- In the event of a divorce, split community property 50/50.
- Intellectual property stays separate.
- Inheritance and gifts is separate property unless commingled.
We Went The Online Route: HelloPrenup
We signed up with HelloPrenup (links are affiliate), which offers straightforward pricing and access to divorce attorneys for our state. The process was simple, quick, and affordable.
Most of the questions around using a service like HelloPrenup is whether or not their document is enforceable in court. As a service, it hasn’t been around long enough to be rigorously tested, but I felt better about this given the involvement of attorneys. As part of the HelloPrenup service, you can select an attorney who is licensed in your state. Each attorney comes vetted, and client reviews can help you narrow down your selection. My attorney was professional, friendly, and followed up on each item of concern quickly.
First Step: We Took A Questionnaire
The questionnaire was relatively straightforward. It asked questions about our premarital set up, including current net worth and debts. Then it offered several options on how to address those items in the prenup. However, the questionnaire was not as straightforward as we hoped. Sometimes we didn’t like any of the answers provided (see below). Luckily you can mark any question as something to discuss with your lawyer.
HelloPrenup defaulted to keeping things separate, unless defined otherwise. I can see why this might be preferable for some, but we wanted the opposite. Shared is the default status in our state, so it was odd that this was not offered as a standard option. Here is an example of one question from the survey where we got stuck, and the note we tagged to talk about with our attorneys. Note that these were the only two options we could select!
Luckily, in review our attorneys went over every question and every section of the prenup with us. In the review, they were able to change any language in the document, so we could customize the document to suit our preference.
My partner’s take:
“I was about 90% satisfied with this service. It’s basically a boilerplate copy-paste form with legal backing. The website is polished, there’s helpful reminder emails and updates to keep the process moving, and the integrated marketplace for simple flat-fee legal representation takes a lot of the legwork out of it.
However, not being able to answer ‘make this shared property’ on many of the questions was baffling – it seems like many of the questions are for carving out property away from your partner, not affirming the shared status that the state often grants by default. As prenups get more common, I think we should do everything possible to destigmatize the process and make it a positive and collaborative document, not a battleground. I would expect them to change this behavior in future iterations of the platform.”
Intermediate Steps: The Clauses That Launched a Thousand Questions
While we thought our agreement would be straightforward, we also stumbled on some tricky thought exercises. Here are some areas where we spent extra time considering our options:
- What if one partner wants to start a new business that the other partner doesn’t want to be involved in?
- Is the income from pre-marital investment portfolios considered joint?
- Purrhaps the most important for our day-to-day lives: who gets which cat?!
- What about healthcare during and after divorce?
Funding a business with premarital money
My attorney described it this way: say you wanted to open a food truck, but your spouse thinks food trucks are a waste of time and money. You could use premarital funds to start and own a new business. The income from a hypothetical food truck would be shared property, but if you split up, you get to keep your food truck business and all its delicious subsequent profit.
In a more realistic situation, we would likely do business together as an agreed-upon venture, and define the responsibilities, roles, division of assets, etc. when we set it up (with post-martial funds). But this allows for some autonomy if we want to try something risky on our own, with our “own” money. So we decided that businesses funded with premarital money would stay separate property.
What about growth of money in investments?
Depending on where you live, the growth on premarital assets may be classified as joint income in marriage. As you can imagine, that can quickly become an accounting headache! We both have significant premarital savings, and we opted to keep all premarital assets separate, including their growth.
Globally, we consider what we each built pre-marriage to be separate and our new efforts post-marriage to be combined. In the case of divorce, my partner’s earning potential would provide significant security for them, and my FIRE portfolio would sustain me. We both spent significant pre-marriage effort to establish our respective safety nets, even though we plan to accomplish even more as a couple.
It feels simpler to leave our old investments alone and separate while we build new, shared wealth together. If we do pull from premarital investments during marriage, that income becomes joint property, so it’s important to keep records. Our attorneys recommended a sunset clause for this section, something like “In 10 years, it all becomes joint property.” In the end, we decided to skip the sunset clause. If we want to revisit it, we can make changes later in a ‘post-nup’.
Who Gets Which Cat
Custody battles aren’t just for kids. You can also specify what happens to pets and other joint assets. We agreed that I get Felix, my partner gets Izzy. The cats made this easy for us by each having a ‘favorite’ human.
If we decide not to stay together for the kits, we have their fates sorted.
What about healthcare during divorce?
One thing about all this planning is it forces you to think of some worst-case scenarios. Currently, we get healthcare through my partner’s job. If we were to split, I’d have to get on the healthcare marketplace or move abroad. But what if I was already undergoing expensive treatments for a preexisting condition? What if I had to juggle ongoing chemo, divorcing my partner AND my funds were tied up trying to purchase a new place to live?
I brought this up with my attorney and she eagerly added in a clause to cover a situation like this. She said it was smart to do this because she’s worked with many couples whose husband decides to leave as their wife undergoes cancer treatment (yeesh).
Here’s what that looks like in legalese:
“Upon termination of the marriage by legal proceedings, each Party shall be responsible to obtain and maintain their own health and dental insurance coverage. However, the Parties further agree that if one Party has been diagnosed with terminal illness, cancer and/or any other life threatening disease/illness (the Diagnosed Party), and if the other, undiagnosed Party is providing health and/or dental insurance at the time of the divorce to the Diagnosed Party, the undiagnosed Party will be required to maintain health insurance for the benefit of the Diagnosed Party, so long as the undiagnosed Party’s insurance plan allows for this. Additionally, if the insurance plan does allow for this, it is further agreed to by the parties that the Diagnosed Party will reimburse the undiagnosed Party for maintaining said insurance.”
HelloPrenup Pricing
HelloPrenup’s prenups cost a flat, one-time fee of $599 per couple.
HelloPrenup also offers online e-signature and notarization for $50 per couple. In many states you will need to get it notarized to be official, but thankfully these days that can be done remotely over a simple video call.
Couples have the option to add attorney services at any point during the process. HelloPrenup offers Q&A sessions for $49 per fiance and attorney document review, e-signature, and notarization for $699 per partner. Some states (like ours, CA) require each partner to have independent legal counsel for the document to hold up in court, so this was necessary for both of us.
We did the whole kit and kaboodle for a total of ~$1,400. Overall it feels like a great deal when compared to the stress of starting from scratch and having to find our own legal representation. Between creating the initial templated version and subsequent edits by each of our lawyers, it took us only 1 week to draft a prenup. It’s worth noting that many states have mandatory waiting periods – in CA, we had to wait 7 days from ‘approval’ before we could sign it. HelloPrenup handles this flawlessly and sends an exciting update when it’s time to sign! It has to be signed before getting married, so include that in your timeline!
Final Step: Signed, Sealed, (Hopefully Never) Delivered
In the end, creating a prenup wasn’t about anticipating failure, it was about communicating clearly, planning for the future, and making sure we were on the same page. Like any good engineering project, it required some up-front design thinking: asking “what if?” and building a system that could adapt to change.
Using HelloPrenup made the process accessible, even kind of empowering. Now, instead of avoiding the hard conversations, we’ve had them. We walked away with peace of mind, a signed prenup, and two cats who are blissfully unaware of their legal status as ‘joint property’.
This was really interesting – thanks for the review!
Wondering if you found a lot of competition in the marketplace or if this was kind of it.
If you’re looking for similar blog-fodder, I’ve been curious about the must-have documents that Suze O relentlessly markets. I’ve poked around a little online and haven’t found much about them, either good or bad.
That’s a great question– I didn’t find much competition at all in the online prenup space. I did consider RocketLawyer and did create a free draft prenup with them to see what to expect.
Thanks for mentioning the Suze O must-have documents, they hadn’t been on my radar. How frustrating that all of these legal documents all cost so much for potentially ‘must-have’ legal protection. I’ll check them out!
I’m glad to see this article tackling the often uncomfortable topic of prenups in a straightforward way. This aligns with some of the information I found on how they can actually improve relationships, like the article mentions, by having open conversations about money and other aspects.