I would say this wraps it up pretty well:
We encourage couples planning on getting married not to do a prenup. It creates too many problems for a marriage:
1. Beginning in distrust
2. A planned defensive strategy against your spouse
3. Represents an exit strategy for your marriage
Just our opinion, but they are a bad idea.
And I also can appreciate what 12strings says here:
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In general for younger people getting married, I would say it is a very bad idea.
However, for older people who have already been married, had children, and been divorced or widowed...a prenup that declares whose children will get what assets makes it much easier when one of them passess away. For example, my wife's grandmother passed away in her 80's. The grandfather remarried, then died 3 years later. They had pre-decided, that if he died, his children and grandchildren would inherit the farmland to sell, and some other financial assets he had built up over time. the new wife's children would not get half... They also decided that the wife WOULD get to keep the house, so she would not be without a place to live when he died. This prevented any kind of inheritance battle between the 2 families.
This seems reasonable as well, for the reason I bolded:
I would add this: My wife and I have no pre-nup and we discussed it previously: In our marriage vows, we intentionally chose these old - school Anglican vows: "with this ring, I thee wed; with my body, I thee worship; and all my worldly goods, I thee endow"
We chose these older Anglican vows as part of our ceremony because we loved the Theological signifigance of them, and they expressed something about this very topic...financially, all that we owned now belonged unreservedly to the other...
I also added to
my personal vows: along with the "love" "honor" "forsaken all others" part "to provide" as we felt that the Scriptures teach that a man is responsible to "provide for his own" and we sort of felt that that ought to be part of the promise any husband should make to his wife in their vows.