It’s a good time to be a prenuptial agreement.
Once seen as a taboo topic — or even bad luck — premarital contracts have been shedding their stigma in recent years. It’s quite likely Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce just signed one, and the recent best-selling memoir “Strangers” by Belle Burden served as a cautionary tale of a prenup gone wrong.
Haley Sacks, a millennial and Gen Z financial expert who goes by Mrs. Dow Jones on Instagram and TikTok, and who authored the best-selling “Future Rich Person,” is, not surprisingly, a major proponent.
“I think it’s really important to normalize putting the prenup on the to-do list right next to your cake tasting,” she said. “We’ve normalized spending insane amounts of money on a party and stigmatized the one legal document that protects you after it,” she added. “It makes no sense.”
Here’s what she would like anyone headed to the altar to consider.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You refer to prenups as “marriage insurance.” Why?
We get all different types of insurance without expecting anything bad to happen — you get health insurance not wanting to get sick or hoping you get sick. You buy homeowners’ insurance not crossing your fingers that your house is going to burn down.
A lot of people hear “prenup,” and they think that you’re planning for a divorce, but that is really the wrong framing. Marriage is, at its core, a business decision. Yes, it’s an emotional commitment, but you’re also legally bound to this person.
Better to decide the terms of that contract while you’re deeply in love than during one of the most emotionally charged times of your life — a divorce.
How are prenups different for young couples today than in previous generations?
Millennials and Gen Z view prenups as financial planning. This generation is marrying later, building businesses before marriage, investing earlier and creating assets our parents never had. Twenty years ago, people were protecting vacation homes. Today they’re protecting creator brands, trademarks, crypto and intellectual property. I’ve seen a huge increase in questions over the last year, especially from women. They’re asking, “How do I protect the business I spent years building before he came along?”
What are things that influencers or content creators should consider with a prenup?
Wealth looks so different now than it did 30 years ago. With content creators, it’s really hard because the line is really blurred between personal life and business. If your marriage becomes part of your brand, then questions could arise about future royalties, ownership of old content, licensing deals or revenue tied to your likeness, which is connected to you being married.
If your marriage becomes part of your brand, your prenup needs to protect your business just as much as your bank account. The first thing I’d tell any creator is this: Your business needs a 100 percent equity carve out. That’s lawyer speak for “this company is mine.” Your business, your trademarks, your copyrights, your content library, your likeness — those should all be clearly defined as separate property.
Then think about future content. If your business keeps growing after you get married, who owns the podcast episodes, brand deals, licensing income or old videos that keep making money years later?
What if your spouse regularly appears in content you create?
That’s the gray area. If your spouse becomes your co-host or is constantly appearing in your videos, you need to make decisions upfront: If the relationship ends, can you keep that content online? Does anyone get a share of future revenue? Those conversations are awkward now, but infinitely more awkward later.
As more couples turn to fertility treatments, what about reproductive “property,” like embryos?
Embryos create an entirely different category of complexity because they involve both financial investment and deeply personal reproductive decisions.
Fertility clinics require consent forms, but these are often super generic, so a prenup or a specific addendum will legally bind the couple to a decision. That may mean the embryos being destroyed or donated to science or given to one partner with explicit legal severing of the other partner’s parental rights and child support obligations.
How can a prenup protect spouses who choose to leave the work force to support their family at home?
I think one of the biggest financial risks that people underestimate isn’t divorce — it’s career interruption. If you step away from a six-figure career for five to 10 years to raise kids, you’re not just giving up salary, you’re giving up relationships, promotions, retirement contributions, social security credits, future earning potential. This is often referred to as the “motherhood earnings penalty.”
Who benefits most from a prenup?
There’s a misconception that prenups only protect the richer spouse, but I think they protect both people, because it’s just financial clarity. For the spouse with fewer assets, a prenup can guarantee financial protections that would otherwise be uncertain.Prenups also reduce the likelihood of a lot of expensive litigation if the marriage ends.
A successful business would define expectations before the problems arise. A successful couple would benefit from doing the same.
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