You Don't Need Millions to Want a Prenup
Our nanny, Eve, told me a few weeks ago that she and her fiancé are getting a prenup.
My first reaction was genuine confusion — not the "how could you" kind, just an honest "wait, why?" kind.
Eve doesn't have significant individual assets to protect. No trust fund, no business, no inheritance waiting in the wings. From what I understood about prenups, they existed for people with something specific to shield if things went sideways. Eve, as far as I could tell, didn't fit that description.
So I asked her. And her answer changed how I think about prenups entirely.
Eve's Reasons Had Nothing to Do With Money She Has
Eve gave me three reasons, and only one of them was really about assets.
The first: A prenup lays out exactly who's bringing what to the table, even when the amounts are modest. Her savings, his savings, whatever they each own outright — spelled out in writing, not assumed.
The second: It forces a conversation most couples put off until it's too late to have calmly. Money, debt, spending habits, what happens if one of them wants to go back to school or take a career risk — all of it gets discussed now, on purpose, instead of stumbling into it later during an argument.
The third reason was the real one, the one underneath the other two.
Eve watched her parents go through an ugly, drawn-out divorce — the kind with lawyers and years and a level of bitterness that reshaped how her whole family talked to each other afterward. She doesn't want a hedge against her own marriage failing. She wants to remove as much uncertainty as possible, just in case, so that if the worst ever happened, it wouldn't look like what she grew up watching.
"I'm not planning for a divorce," she told me. "I'm planning to never have the kind of divorce my parents had."
Why More Couples Are Doing This — And It's Not Just the Wealthy Anymore
Eve isn't an outlier. Prenups have become significantly more common, especially among younger couples, and the reasons echo what she told me.
People are marrying later than previous generations, which means many are entering marriage already holding individual savings, retirement accounts, or income streams built up over years on their own — assets worth naming clearly, even at modest levels. The old assumption that prenups exist only for the wealthy has faded as more people realize "modest" assets still deserve clarity.
The stigma has faded too. Prenups used to be treated as an unromantic signal — proof you didn't trust the relationship, or a quiet admission you expected it to fail. That framing doesn't hold the way it used to. Prenups are now openly discussed among engaged couples as a practical step, not a bad omen.
And then there's the part almost nobody thinks about until it's too late: without a prenup, state law decides everything if a marriage ends. In community-property states, that generally means a straight 50/50 split of whatever was acquired during the marriage, regardless of who earned what or brought what in. A prenup is the only way to have any say in that outcome ahead of time.
What a Prenup Actually Can — and Can't — Do
A few misconceptions are worth clearing up, because they keep people from even considering one.
Prenups don't expire on their own after some number of years. So-called "sunset clauses" exist, but they're unusual, not standard — a prenup you sign at 28 doesn't quietly dissolve by the time you're 40.
They also can't dictate child custody or child support; family courts handle those separately, based on the child's circumstances at the time, not an agreement made years earlier. And infidelity penalty clauses — the idea that cheating triggers some financial punishment written into the prenup — generally aren't enforceable, no matter how often they show up in pop culture.
The New Wrinkle: DIY and AI-Drafted Prenups
One more thing worth flagging, especially given how normalized AI has become in financial decisions generally: More couples are turning to chatbots or online templates to draft a prenup themselves before ever talking to a lawyer, hoping to save on legal fees.
The problem is the same one that shows up anywhere people lean on AI for something legally or financially complex — it's easy to miss the specific, non-obvious details that a real prenup needs to address. A document that looks complete can still leave major gaps. If you're going this route to save money upfront, it's worth having an actual attorney review the final version before anyone signs anything.
Back to Eve
Eve's prenup was never about protecting money she doesn't have. It's about protecting the version of her marriage's ending that she never wants to live through — the version she already watched up close.
A prenup isn't a bet against a relationship. For Eve, it's the opposite: a decision to handle the hardest conversations like adults, on a calm afternoon, long before there's any real conflict attached to them.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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