Are you about to get married and looking for ways to protect your personal assets? Perhaps your significant other does not want to sign a prenuptial agreement, but you worry about commingling your assets and then losing a portion of them in a divorce. What can you do?
One option is to put some of your assets into a trust. Generally, courts treat these assets as separate property, not marital property. You also eliminate the risk of commingling your assets since they are clearly defined in the trust, rather than simple put into a bank account to which you both have access.
One huge advantage here is that you can create the trust on your own. Your significant other is not part of the process. You do not need his or her consent to start the trust and transfer your own assets.
That’s the problem with using a prenup, which can offer some of the same protections. Your significant other has to agree to the prenup as well, or it is invalid. With a trust, the decision is yours and yours alone.
Using trusts is especially popular with business owners. By moving company assets and ownership of the entire company into the trust, they can ensure that a divorce will not have a negative impact on the business. While you do not plan to get divorced, if you own a company, you do need to plan for the possibility to protect your business.
When considering asset protection and divorce, make sure you know about all of the legal options at your disposal.