Despite what wedding magazines want us to think, sometimes marriages don’t work out. Premarital agreements help assure you that the property you owned before marriage, as well as any income derived from that property, will remain if your “happily ever after” isn’t forever.

When contemplating marriage, couples often agree to enter into a premarital or prenuptial agreement in order to accomplish certain boundaries pertaining to a party’s assets or liabilities. Premarital agreements often serve to protect one spouse from federal income tax debt or other liabilities of the other spouse.

A party who begins a marriage with income producing separate property may wish to keep the other spouse from being able to acquire the income earned from his or her separate property. Premarital agreements accomplish those ends and more.

Despite the common misconception that premarital agreements mean the spouses don’t trust one another, that is hardly the case. Premarital agreements are akin to an insurance policy; it has your back when things go wrong.