While a prenuptial agreement is intended to determine whether you or your partner have rights to certain assets in the event the marriage ends, the postnuptial agreement does the same but with one key difference: A postnuptial agreement is created after your marriage has already taken place.

Protect Your Future Earnings

Our lives are constantly changing; values shift over time and its common to embrace different lifestyles, unique to each family. One of these such lifestyles is the stay-at-home parent. Today, there are many reasons why it might make sense for one parent to stay home with the children and forego a career. These could include high childcare costs, one spouse’s high earning potential, the health and safety of the child in this pandemic age, or just a decision to embrace more traditional child rearing practices.

If you have decided to quit your job and be a stay-at-home parent, it’s natural to have mixed feelings about it. After all, you are taking yourself out of the workforce during what may be your highest-earning years. If you want to protect yourself in the event of divorce, consider asking your spouse to sign a postnuptial agreement.

Even if you feel that a divorce is highly unlikely, a postnuptial agreement may nonetheless be beneficial. It is a written acknowledgement by both spouses of the work/career trade-offs you are choosing to make in order to be a full-time caregiver to your children.

It’s important to acknowledge that by being a stay-at-home parent, you are not just giving up the paycheck you were earning. You are giving up professional contacts, promotions, work experience, bonuses and many other interactions and experiences one would pick up over the course of their career.

If ever you do end up getting divorced, it will likely be difficult to re-enter the workforce at the salary and level that you had earned before you left your job. You may even need to go back to school to update your skills and catch up on current technology. A postnuptial agreement can make arrangements for you if you sacrifice your career for the betterment of the family, and it can allow for settlement money to be given to you following divorce while giving you time to establish yourself financially, without the assistance of your former partner. Such contingencies could be addressed in your postnuptial agreement.

A postnuptial agreement may even help you definitively settle any marital tensions that may have arisen in regards to your financial situation since you decided to stay home with the kids. It may also help to ensure that you and your kids will be properly protected financially in the event that you and your spouse go your separate ways.

Contact Morneau Law

After you and your family determine your new dynamic, with one parent choosing to stay-at-home, contact our family lawyers at Morneau Law. We will work alongside you to determine the best safeguards to put in place to protect everyone involved, while also supporting your new lifestyle change. We do this in a collaborative manner as we are sensitive that you want to remain part of a happy family. If you want to learn more about postnuptial agreements or are ready to get started, please contact us today.