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“Quiet Quit” Your Marriage via a Postnuptial Agreement

Chantale Suttle • March 21, 2023
A man and a woman face away from each on a bed and look distressed.

If your marriage stands on fragile ground, such as the aftermath of an affair or simply drifting apart, you may be considering your options.

 

If divorce is too threatening now, but the marriage is too stifling, you may need time alone to rediscover yourselves and each other. Psychologically, your separation may be the right choice to recenter yourselves and possibly to reclaim your relationship chemistry, but pragmatically, there are other considerations.

 

Specifically, Florida doesn’t allow legal separation. In the state of Florida, like only a few other states, you are *either* married or divorced.

 

Marital liability doesn’t stop just because you two decide to live apart, perhaps date other people, and essentially become single for a while. The law still sees your finances as a piece of your marital union, debts included.

 

You aren’t helpless by a long shot, despite Florida’s lack of legal separation. You can still take the reins on your financial planning for possible divorce.

 

Contracts make the world go round, and they can preserve your financial and psychological health during separation.

 

In this case, the contract is a postnuptial agreement. Postnuptial agreements, or postnups, are legal contracts created during the marriage (i.e., after the wedding vows) and that are executed upon signing. Prenuptial agreements are the same type of legal contracts, but they are created before the wedding and executed upon marriage. We offer both mediated prenups and mediated postnups.

 

Your postnup can be the substitute for legal separation by preserving and allocating assets, assigning them to a partner, and determining liability for debts created during this period.

 

Decide how marital assets should be preserved for a certain partner, or determine how marital assets can be used to enable one partner to leave the marital home without undue financial stress to either partner.

 

Manage debts. Whether it’s your debt, your partner’s debt, or marital debt (i.e., shared by both of you), now is the time to finalize in writing how you will manage the uglier side of your finances.

 

Ask yourself if money should be set aside to help one partner get back in the workforce if divorce appears more than likely and record your mutual decision in the postnup.

 

Decide if the departing partner should be responsible for utilities and repairs at the marital home, or for the costs associated with a pet.

 

Make choices now, during a period of relative calm, for whether alimony, otherwise known as spousal support, should be part of a divorced settlement and on what terms.

 

Delineate how your marital property acquired over the years will be divided if divorce occurs.

 

See if your premarital property (i.e., the assets that you brought into the marriage with you) has become mingled with marital property: now is the time to untangle assets and assign them to a partner. The trick is once you have made such decisions regarding marital versus nonmartial assets in your postnup, you must stick to the rules you have created so that you don’t revert to mingling again.

 

The catch: under Florida law, you cannot make an independent determination about child support numbers, which are handled by the Florida family law courts. If you insist on drafting some guidance in the postnup about child support, the amount and duration must exceed Florida’s child support calculation guidelines.


Besides your mediator, the expert who can give you the most privacy while calculating these numbers is your CPA. CPAs can guide estranged couples through mandatory financial disclosure in a less adversarial, less threatening setting.  They're the best professional to bring with you to mediation.  To learn more about CPAs in the context of prenups, postnups, and divorce, read here.

 

You may also plan for your children’s future in your postnup, whether or not divorce is in the picture, via a trust instrument that is best suited for your unique circumstances.

 

Your postnup, just like a prenup, may be handled through mediation, which involves both of you working with a mediator, or through representation, which means separate attorneys are representing each partner. To understand more about the differences between mediation versus representation by an attorney, please see our blog post.

 

Separation may be the best thing for your marriage, or it may be the best thing to put your life back in your control. However, your happiness and standard of living shouldn’t suffer because your marital assets and debts were left hanging in the breeze.

 

You can control these outcomes more effectively with a postnup so that both sides can feel secure about the future – however the future works out.

 

To explore your options, please talk with us.


We offer remote consultations via Zoom to work with your schedule. Complete the questionnaire to initiate a free consultation.

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By 7107328235 March 27, 2025
A prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can save your business. Consider two dry cleaners, Ricky and Fred. Both thought they would be married to their wives until “death do they part.” Unfortunately, they both ended up divorced. Ricky walked out of divorce court personally and professionally ruined. Fred, while emotionally drained, was able to maintain and grow his successful business. Why the different outcomes? Ricky’s Story Ricky owned a dry cleaning business with Lucy, his wife of 19 years. Ricky was in charge of all aspects of the business, but Lucy did manage the company’s payroll and vendors part-time. Occasionally, she worked the front counter. For the most part, Lucy raised the children and cared for her elderly parents. When they decided to divorce, Ricky and Lucy were still civil and wanted their divorce to be amicable. Ricky and Lucy worked together, without lawyers, to craft a plan for sharing time with their teenage sons, and for sharing the family’s expenses. They also agreed to sell their house after their youngest son graduated high school. After a few months, and at the urging of a well-intentioned friend, Lucy hired a lawyer to write up the couples’ plan. Lucy’s main goal was to make sure the divorce ended fairly for her children. The lawyer, however, believed that since any small business owner could hide income, assets, or a company’s true value, then Ricky must be doing that too. Even though Lucy had a base of knowledge of the business’s finances, she trusted her lawyer and figured that he knew better. So, she agreed to his “scorched earth” strategy to protect her children. What is a “scorched earth strategy”? This is a common tactic to squeeze a business owner into a large and early settlement. The lawyer hires an accountant, and they go after every scrap of information and document pertaining to the company’s assets and liabilities, and they question it all—every argument and angle of attack is fair game. Much of the cost of providing the information and documents, and defending business decisions, must be paid by the business. Scared and desperate, Ricky lawyered up too. Unfortunately, Ricky’s lawyer couldn’t advise him on the settlement terms proposed by Lucy’s lawyer without conducting his own analysis of the company’s voluminous records. Much of the paper work involved in operating a dry cleaning business was foreign to him, and the stringent environmental regulations and reporting was overwhelming. Ricky’s lawyer had to hire his own accountant to help value the business for the divorce. Ricky and Lucy were now far from civil with one another, and the mud began to fly. Faced with dueling accountants, complicated and conflicting arguments about the business’s finances and value, and accusations against Ricky of financial wrongdoing, the family court judge appointed an independent forensic accountant to advise the court. The independent accountant saw that the business, which was the couple’s biggest asset, was crumbling because the ugly divorce was keeping Ricky from focusing on the business. The accountant was also worried about the accusations of financial wrongdoing by Ricky. So, on the independent accountant’s recommendation, the court appointed a receiver to operate and protect the dry cleaning business. Ricky and Lucy were now paying six different professionals, and trial was still months away. The receiver discovered that the company’s records did not comply with dry cleaning waste disposal regulations, and reported the non-compliance to government authorities. Ricky and Lucy blamed each other for the missing paperwork, and the sour relationship between them stalled and ultimately prevented joint efforts at an amnesty program and damage control. The business began to accrue daily statutory fines, employees were laid off, debts mounted, and the business eventually shut its doors while Ricky and Lucy continued to fight in divorce court. A year later, with no business to provide income for Ricky or Lucy, Ricky agreed to settle by paying Lucy more than half of his share of the house. Lucy accepted the offer, even though it was smaller then what she expected originally, because her share of the house was pledged to pay her lawyer’s fees. Fred’s Story Fred was married to Ethel for 22 years, and they have a daughter. Like Ricky and Lucy, Fred ran the business while Ethel was involved part-time in just certain aspects. But unlike Ricky and Lucy, when Fred bought his dry cleaning business nine years earlier, Fred and Ethel signed a postnuptial agreement to protect each other in case of divorce. The attorney-drafted agreement laid out a strict structure for evaluating and dividing the business, and for determining Fred’s true income for spousal and child support calculations. It identified and limited the financial information and documents that the business would have to disclose. It also required that the couple use a single neutral accountant (who would be paid from marital property and not by the company), to gather and evaluate that financial information and documentation. Early in the divorce, Ethel agreed that the postnuptial agreement was valid. She waived any right to ask the court to force the company to disclose more information or documents than described in the postnuptial agreement. This entitled Ethel to an immediate, fair, and higher award of support, thanks to a provision that she and Fred put in the agreement to encourage a quick resolution. Within a month, Fred and Ethel’s divorce was finalized, with minimal attorneys’ and accountant fees, and with no interference or intrusion into the dry cleaning business or operations. How could two similarly situated businesses and families leave divorce court with such different results? The first story is horrifying, but exceedingly common. Many states have onerous disclosure requirements that unnecessarily burden the time and finances of a small business. Unscrupulous divorce lawyers are trained to hone in and target a business owner’s fear of having the business’s confidential and financial information exposed to the world, to induce an early and usually unfair settlement. Fair and careful divorce lawyers will also want extensive company records, because they fear being liable for giving bad advice if they make recommendations without investigating the whole picture themselves. Either way, good lawyer or a bad one, smart judge or not, a case involving a small business can be very costly. The best way to avoid being a Ricky, is to get a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement like Fred. A good prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can render the most intrusive and damaging financial disclosures unnecessary, and can limit or attribute the related costs away from the business. In some situations, as shown above, they can save the business itself. If Ricky had a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement in place, maybe a receiver would not have been necessary, and Ricky and Lucy could have resolved the business’s regulatory problems confidentially without going out of business. Ricky and Fred were not wrong to believe in their marriages. A life-long commitment is not fanciful; it is a hopeful and beautiful goal. Most couples think they will reach that goal and that other couples will fill our country’s depressing divorce statistics. But consider this, we buy life insurance, install security systems, and wear seat belts “just in case.” They give us security even if we think that odds will always be in our favor. A careful and thorough prenuptial or postnuptial agreement can provide you, your spouse, and your business with security that all will be protected in a divorce, and that years of building a life and a business will not be burned to the ground. Chantale Suttle is the Managing Attorney and Founder of DADvocacy™ Law Firm, which is headquartered in Miami, Florida. She has been in the exclusive practice of family law for over 21 years and has served countless small business owners in divorce court. Drafting prenuptial and postnuptial agreements for small business owners is her favorite work.
A couple sits on a bench as one person reaches out to the other who is turned away.
By 7107328235 January 15, 2025
Your fiancé or fiancée presented you with a prenuptial draft: will you sign it before you hear wedding bells? Now you need a review by an attorney to ensure that your assets and your future security are protected: welcome to JustPrenups' prenup review! JustPrenups now offers UPLOADR: quickly share your prenup draft easily from any device in multiples format through UPLOADR on our site - no scanning, no email. Once we receive your prenup draft, an attorney examines the prenup that you received and then meets with you for a free consultation on Zoom. We hold your document and its data in confidence, even if you don't retain us, per our ethical requirements.
A couple walks along a Florida beach by the water in sunshine.
By 7107328235 December 26, 2024
Florida is a quirky place full of contrasts, and so is its family law. In particular, recent updates to Florida family law have changed the rules for alimony in Florida prenups. If your prenuptial agreement doesn't follow these changed rules, your prenup may not be valid and enforceable; as a result, you may be facing high financial stakes in divorce litigation that may put your assets at risk.
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