Picture this: You’re in your 60s.
You’ve been married for more than 40 years.
You raised six children full-time, while your spouse built their career, earning $200,000 annually.
All those years, you believed you were building a comfortable retirement together.
Then the divorce papers arrive, alongside a devastating revelation — there are no retirement savings.
Nothing.
Your spouse gambled everything away on penny stocks without your knowledge.
After 40+ years of marriage, the only asset that remains is the house and the land it sits on.
The judge sympathetically awards you that house. But the court can only divide what’s left — they can’t recover your ex-spouses’ gambling losses.
Decades of what should have been shared savings?
Gone forever.
You were blindsided. You didn’t have any access to the financial accounts. You didn’t see the assets dwindling down.
You rely on your six children, who are now adults, to help you pay your bills.
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Or imagine this: Your spouse earns $200,000 yearly while you stay home raising children.
Your “allowance” for personal expenses? Just $300 monthly.
That’s all you can access — for clothes, haircuts, coffee with friends, everything.
Need more? You must ask permission, item by item.
These aren’t hypothetical horror stories.
Harvard-trained attorney Aaron Thomas has witnessed these exact scenarios unfold during his career in family law.
These are, unfortunately, both true stories.
“One spouse can end up paying the price for the other spouse’s financial mismanagement,” Thomas explained when he joined us for a Valentine’s Day special podcast episode last week.
The most chilling part? Most victims never saw it coming.
They trusted that their partner shared their financial values, without confirming it in writing, without documenting their agreements, without protecting themselves.
They never established basic transparency like shared logins to accounts, visibility into investments, or rules about major purchases.
“I truly believe that this is a couple that never would have ended up in this type of situation if she had simply had her own logins to the bank accounts,” Thomas said, referring to the client in her 60s whose retirement savings vanished.
This client “had no access to the accounts. She had no visibility to them. There were no annual shareholders meetings taking place in this household.”
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Thomas has watched countless marriages dissolve where the fundamental problem wasn’t falling out of love — it was that things “don’t go wrong, they start wrong.”
In one particularly painful case, Thomas described a client who inherited a substantial sum from their grandfather — who had painstakingly saved this money.
The inheritance was legally considered separate property, protected from division during divorce.
But then, wanting to build a future together, the client used that inheritance to pay off the mortgage on the couple’s shared home.
What the client didn’t realize: this action legally transformed their protected inheritance into joint marital property.
When the marriage ended years later, the client was devastated to learn that half of their grandfather’s legacy — money explicitly meant to stay in their family — would now go to their ex-spouse.
A single financial decision, made without understanding the legal implications, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“They don’t realize that I have just taken money that my grandfather gave to me and wanted to stay in their family,” Thomas said, “and now I’m splitting it with someone that I’m no longer going to be with.”
As the adage says: Trust, but verify.
Trusting too much — without verifying through documentation — resulted in losing half of a family legacy that should have remained protected.
What makes Thomas’s perspective so refreshing is his emphasis that prenups aren’t just divorce insurance — they’re relationship strengtheners.
The same principles that protect you in worst-case scenarios actually build stronger marriages day-to-day.
“I like to look at a prenup more as a partnership agreement,” said Thomas, who drafts prenups and postnups in more than 30 states.
“Yes, you’re going to have what you might call a termination clause … but that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to make things run smoothly during the pendency of the business itself.”
The real power of a prenup, according to Thomas, lies in “helping you resolve conflict during the course of the relationship, particularly when it comes to finances.”
For example, Thomas recommends couples include “annual shareholders meetings” in their agreements — dedicated times to review finances together, discuss budgets, and realign expectations as life changes.
Many couples also benefit from setting spending thresholds (like $500) that require both partners’ approval for joint account purchases.
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Thomas applies these rules in his own marriage.
“My wife and I have a rule that neither one of us could spend over $500 from any joint account unless we both approve of the expenditure ahead of time,” he said.
These agreements aren’t about restricting freedom — they’re about creating clarity, encouraging communication, and building mutual respect.
“Even just disclosure of assets and debts is a good starting point,” Thomas said. “For many couples, this is the first time that they’ve had anywhere close to this amount of visibility into each other’s finances.”
These written “partnership agreements” create the foundation for financial transparency, Thomas said.
They encourage difficult conversations. They help couples put expectations in writing and establish clear money management rules. These elements make marriages stronger.
“The same things that make for a healthy relationship make for a solid prenup, Thomas emphasized. “Transparency, communication, and fairness.”
Watch our full interview on YouTube.
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