What if the Prenup is the Risk?
If you’ve spent years building and protecting family wealth, your child’s engagement may bring a new worry: What happens to those assets if the marriage ends? A prenup may seem like the obvious safeguard. But when treated as the automatic price of marrying into wealth, it may do more harm to the couple’s relationship than good for the family’s assets.
Understanding the potential costs of a prenup
Engagement is a tender, defining moment. Two people are choosing each other and imagining a life together. If the first family conversation about wealth centers on what happens if the marriage ends, a newly engaged partner may feel distrusted, and the couple’s excitement may give way to planning for a future they hope never comes.
I challenge parents, advisors, and other family members to consider the broader picture: What financial risks truly remain, given the family’s prior planning—and what relationship risks might we introduce by making a prenup a condition of marriage? In many families, trusts and estate plans have already put meaningful protections in place. The remaining financial exposure may be far smaller than the fear suggests, while the effect on the couple’s trust may be lasting.
Beyond the prenup
Assets held in a properly structured trust may be shielded from a beneficiary’s creditors, including a divorcing spouse. But when assets are distributed and put into joint names or commingled, they may lose some of those protections. That is why educating the wealth holder about managing inherited assets can matter more than simply asking them to sign a document.
The popular 2026 New York Times bestseller Strangers by Belle Burden illustrates the point. Burden had a prenup yet used distributions from family trusts to buy homes and put her husband’s name on the deeds. While Burden’s divorce losses were great, nearly two thirds of her wealth was protected in other family trusts she did not have access to. This planning, done decades earlier by her family, resulted in her still having a net worth of more than $60 million even after the financial setback of her divorce.
Her painful experience deserves recognition. It also raises a question for families: Could she have been better prepared by learning how trust distributions, joint ownership, and retitling affect inherited assets?
Planning to protect
At Truepoint, we actively help clients’ children understand family assets and the protections already in place. As marriage approaches, we can build on that foundation by helping parents and engaged young people have thoughtful conversations about money, family planning, and the future the couple wants to create.
A prenup may address a specific need that existing plans do not cover. But it should not be the automatic safeguard for every heir. Before asking your child and their future spouse to sign, consider what the family’s plan already protects—and whether education and open conversation would better protect both the assets and the partnership.
