For financial reasons, you have been considering asking your significant other for a prenuptial agreement when you get married. Perhaps you want to protect wealth that you are bringing to the marriage, like an inheritance from your parents, or maybe you are a business owner. There are many ways in which prenups can help by defining how assets should be split up in advance.
But if you do get divorced, and if the two of you have had children, you know that you are also going to have to split up your child custody rights. You want to make sure that you get custody time with your hypothetical children, so can you use your prenup to guarantee that you do?
You actually cannot address custody issues
Although it is logical that you would be interested in protecting child custody rights, a prenuptial agreement is not the way to do it because these issues cannot be addressed in the document. Neither can things like child support obligations. If any of the decisions involve a child, the court has to make them at the time of the divorce, rather than allowing you to make them in advance with a prenup or postnup.
The reason these things are excluded is that the child’s best interests are the deciding factor in how courts decide custody. A custody arrangement detailed in advance in a pre- or post-nuptial agreement might not turn out to be in the best interests of the child.
The divorce process can be complicated, even when using prenuptial agreements to help it go smoothly. Be sure you understand all of your legal options.