“Should I get a prenup?” I’d imagine this to be a burning question in every person hoping to get married…that also cares about their money. In this post, I’ll talk about why you should definitely get a prenup. You’ll read about:

• Why a prenup is a good way to establish fairness / an equal relationship between you and your partner.
• How your cognitive bias can cloud your judgment emotionally, causing you to do do irrational things, like not getting a prenup.
• Why a prenup isn’t emotional, and why it’s just insurance for your money.

Prenup As Fairness And Establishing Equality In Your Marriage

In general, when couples get married, one person comes in with more money than the other.

The reason’s simple: it’s almost impossible for 2 people to have the exact same amount of money at the same time.

Without a prenup, the party with more money is taking more financial risk going into the marriage. This is not fair for the person with more money. The philosophy’s the same as when I talked about who should pay for the first date: neither party is entitled to the financial resources of the other person in a marriage. I certainly hope that inside a marriage that couples would share their wealth and spoil each other – but I think that should come from a place of love, not obligation or expectation.

In short, prenup has 2 benefits:

• Fairness. It equalizes the risks for both parties, and allows for sharing money in the marriage as a way to genuinely display love, as opposed to just an act of obligation.
• Transparency / Clarity. Both parties know exactly how much money each person will get if they get divorced. All the terms are decided ahead of time for full clarity. This allows for a more transparent and healthy relationship where the poorer party doesn’t just stay in the relationship or become too pandering because they fear the financial consequences of a divorce.

Should I Get A Prenup?

Yes. Let’s look at the math and think about this rationally, instead of emotionally.

Again, please take your emotions out of this, 100% and consider the following logic.

The reality is there’s currently a 50% divorce rate. This means you have a 50% of divorce. You might think you have better chances, but it’s like this study where most people polled think they are better than the ‘average’ driver. This is clearly impossible. If everyone was better than average, then what’s the average?

This cognitive bias where you think you’re better than everyone else is called the superiority bias. But the stats are the stats. It’s like there’s stats to show that picking stocks almost never beat the S&P 500. But people pick stocks anyway! Why? Because everyone thinks they’re better or smarter than everyone else (even though by definition this isn’t possible).

But in order to make the best decision, you should make decisions based on actual, concrete data—not on speculation, or irrational “feelings.”

Also consider this. Nobody goes into a marriage wanting to get a divorce, and yet 50% of marriages end in divorce.

No one can predict the future. Look at stocks. Stocks are fairly volatile, and even the smartest hedge funds can’t predict their price movements. And you know what’s even more volatile than stocks? People. And their behavior over the next 50 years.

Hence, you should not be over-confident in your not never getting divorced. It makes no sense. This isn’t to say “every marriage will fail” nor am I implying a nihilistic approach to marriage and love. I firmly believe in marriage and love – but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the hard data.

A lot of people will make crazy excuses not to do prenups like “my partner would never…” But that’s not the issue. The issue is not wanting to have these hard conversations about money with your partner (that’s a red flag already), and making up excuses as to why divorce would never happen, and thus it isn’t worth the time/effort to do a prenup.

To help you out with the tough “should we get a prenup” conversation, there’s an entire chapter in I Will Teach You To Be Rich to discuss how to approach the conversation. The book teaches how you can talk about prenups elegantly…directly from someone who’s actually had those difficult conversations.

If you’re looking to do a prenup, you should definitely buy this under-$10 resource so you can have the conversation that might save a shit ton of your net worth.

Prenups Aren’t Emotional – It’s Just “Geico For Your Money”

You shouldn’t think of prenups as some jab to your partner. And you shouldn’t think of getting a prenup as a gesture of distrust. A prenup’s just an insurance policy for your money. It’s not emotional, it’s just practical.

Loving and trusting your partner is not at odds with getting a prenup. You can love/trust your partner and also get a prenup. Think of it like this:

• Just because you were really good at driving and never gotten in an accident, does that mean you should not have car insurance?
• Just because you’re super healthy, does that mean you should go ahead and call your health insurance?

Of course not! Because insurance is one of those things you hope you never need, but you’re damn glad it’s there when you need it.

Prenup’s the same thing. You hope you never need it, but in the off-chance you get divorced, you’re glad you have the clarity and protection there for your money. And when I say “off-chance,” I’m in reality saying you have a heads-or-tails chance of needing it. But if you want to delude yourself that your chances are way better (i.e. as good as never getting in a car accident), you’d still want to have insurance for your money.

Let me repeat: if you have car insurance, you’re already paying for insurance for something that has a much smaller chance of happening than a divorce. So why not pay for divorce insurance?

And sure, it costs money to pay lawyers to do a prenup, just as it costs an insurance premium to insure your car. However, you’ll find that prenup costs are generally going to only be a small fraction of your wedding. And only a one-time fee, unlike actual insurance that’ll suck your bank account dry.

To wrap up: I hope you never get divorced. But I also hope you’d insure your finances with a prenup after reading this.

Myth Of Prenups Encouraging Divorce

Finally there’s a myth about prenups which I think is false, that is:

• Prenups make people divorce more.

The intuitive reasoning is that there’s no financial consequences in getting a divorce with a prenup (not true), and so the partners split as soon as there’s any problems. This is a myth because I’ve looked far and wide and I couldn’t find any statistical evidence to support the theory that prenup’d couples separate more than non-prenup’d couples.

And lastly, I finally want you to consider this in the context of prenups. If you or your partner is only staying in the marriage in fear of the financial consequences, then what good is the marriage in the first place? None.

Conversely, if you and your partner are going to separate, what advantage is it to not have a prenup? None.

So whether you stay together or get divorced, there’s almost no upside in avoiding a prenup and immense downside (to the tune of half your net worth).