Feb 12, 2025
Getting married means combining your lives in important ways. It also means that, under the law, some of your possessions could potentially belong to your partner. This can become an issue if you have a large gap in wealth between the spouses or if one person makes much more money than the other.
You’ve received a $1.4 million inheritance from your late mother, and it's natural to want to protect this money that your mom has left as a legacy.
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Inheritances are actually a big reason why people get prenups, with online platform Hello Prenup reporting that around 75% of people who create a prenuptial agreement have a potential inheritance between $1 and $1.5 million. So, if you're engaged to be married, it is absolutely worth considering.
This simple contract can save you a lot of heartache down the line. However, there are limitations to prenups and having one doesn't guarantee your funds will remain yours no matter what.
Creating a prenup
Sometimes, people are reluctant to consider prenups because they are afraid it means they are setting their marriage up to fail, or because they feel like people with prenups aren't as committed to staying married.
The reality, however, is that creating a prenup is a vital way to protect important assets. When you consider divorce rates, it would be irresponsible not to try and protect the money your mother left for you.
Your prenup can help to ensure that the money comes with you and secures your future if your marriage doesn't last, and it can also help you to avoid an expensive and painful divorce because you will address key issues in advance at a time when you are getting along, rather than after your relationship has fallen apart.
Creating a prenup can also help you to talk more openly about money and how it will be shared which, ironically, can potentially help to strengthen your marriage and allow you to avoid divorce in the end.
However, having a prenup doesn’t offer you complete protection.
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Limitations of a prenup
Since you inherited money, it is considered separate property in the marriage. As long as you keep it separate and you do not commingle it with marital assets, then it stays your property. If you get a divorce, you typically get to keep it.
If you do commingle it, however, then that's no longer necessarily the case. Mixing the inherited money with marital assets generally turns the inheritance into marital property. This means it would have to be divided in a divorce.
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So what about your prenup? It doesn’t always help you in such a situation. You may assume that with a prenup you can safely do things like putting the money in a joint account with your spouse, but you would be wrong.
“Even if you outline in your prenup that your inheritance should be kept separate if you commingle that inheritance, you could end up losing it anyway. Be very cautious of commingling and make sure your actions line up with what you say in your prenup,” says Nicole Sheehey, the Head of Legal Content at HelloPrenup. “In other words, keep property that you want to be separate, actually physically separate!”
Bottomline, if you have a prenup that dictates how assets are to be divided, you may be able to use the money for joint objectives without worrying that it will no longer be yours if you split up. But there’s still a chance you could lose your inheritance because you decided to commingle it.
The best way to protect your inheritance is with a prenup and keeping it completely separate. Even then state legislation will impact what happens in a divorce.
You should talk with your future spouse about creating a prenup, and you both should get separate lawyers who can advise you of your rights and guide you through the legal process of making a premarital contract that's valid in your state. It is an extremely complicated area of the law, so getting good legal advice is important.
Hopefully, you'll never need it -- but if you do, you'll be very glad you have it.
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Christy Bieber has 15 years of experience as a personal finance and legal writer. She has written for many publications including Forbes, Kilplinger, CNN, WSJ, Credit Karma, Insurify and more.
