Boyfriend and Girlfriend are talking about getting married. First time for both.
They are in their early twenties, barely out of college.
Wealthy families? No, not at all.
Truthfully, neither earns much or has much, or has any reason to expect to inherit much, certainly not anything for a good long time.
But they both want to have prenuptial agreements signed before they walk down the aisle.
Of late, this is increasingly popular among young people who are marriage-minded. But it wasn’t true of this particular demographic as recently as a decade ago..
Are twenty-somethings suddenly so much more knowledgeable and sophisticated about family law?
Well, that may be true to a degree. But that may not be the driving force behind this trend.
It seems to have more to do with the pervasiveness of technology in this mobile era, and the dominance of their youthful peers in the technology arena.
While not every twenty-something creates a Facebook like the young Mark Zuckerberg did, there is no denying that quite a few twenty- and thirty-somethings have – quite suddenly – struck gold, coding mobile apps and other internet software, and pulling off other innovative disruptions in the technology and new media realms. Rags to riches, practically in a blink.
And everyone knows that marriages hit the skids roughly half the time.
So, if that happens to them, they wonder: should my app really be split as though it were our app?
And, when things are good between the couple, often they are in complete agreement that it should not.
And a prenuptial agreement just reflects – memorializes – that understanding, for later, just in case.
Read more in
- this Bloomberg article: Prenups for Ideas Are All the Rage With Millennials
- this Fox 5 News article: Prenups to protect your ideas? and
- this New York Times editorial: Should Couples Get Prenups for Their Ideas?
