Second marriage can be a cause for concern for adult children, but it doesn’t need to be. There are ways to keep everyone happy.

When marrying for a second time in circumstances where you have adult children from a first marriage, there can be an underlying and often unspoken concern around financial issues.

Perhaps the adult children have concerns around preserving the wealth that their parent is bringing to the marriage, just in case that marriage ends for any reason. Perhaps the person marrying themselves has those concerns, or even that the person they are marrying is conscious that their fiancée/fiancé’s children are thinking about it.

These conversations can be difficult and may often be avoided because of an assumption that they are going to be impossible to navigate and keep everyone happy. This does not necessarily have to be the case.

How to address concerns about second marriage

These sort of concerns are perfectly capable of being addressed to everyone’s satisfaction by setting up a prenuptial agreement (if entered into before the marriage), or a post nuptial agreement (if the agreement follows the wedding taking place).

Such agreements are traditionally viewed as documents that look to preserve vast sums of money brought to a marriage by a much more wealthy and successful spouse from the claims of their partner. That is very much an extreme example of how they can sometimes be used. More commonly, they are being taken up in more orthodox day-to-day family situations, very often to avoid the difficulties that the individuals in the above example might be concerned about.

In very broad terms, these agreements can avoid many of the underlying concerns that any individuals might have when a couple approach marriage together. These need not be negative and certainly in my experience the process of entering into one does instead provide the couple with clarity and an additional layer of trust that might not have before existed between them.

What are pre and post-nuptial agreements?

Pre and post-nuptial agreements are bespoke documents and can be drafted and adapted to suit all manner of situations. The example where adult children and potentially spouses have concerns about wealth being preserved for the family post-divorce is just one of them.

If you would like to discuss your circumstances, please get in touch, we’d love to help.

This article is part of a series on the various benefits of pre and post-nuptial agreements:

 

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