What to have ready before you start

About you, and the wedding

• Your full legal name, exactly as it should appear in the agreement.
• Your telephone number, and the city and state you live in.
• Whether English is the language you read contracts in.
• The number of children you have from a prior relationship, if any.
• Whether you have a will or a trust.
• The date of the wedding, and the city and state where you will marry.
• The other party's email address.

Property you own

For each piece of real estate:

• The street address, city and county.
• How title is held today. Your deed says this; if the property is in a trust, the full name of the trust.
• Whether you owned it before the marriage.
• A recent mortgage statement, for the lender and the balance.
• What you think it is worth, and how you know: an appraisal, a broker's opinion, or your own estimate.

Accounts

• The most recent statement for each bank and investment account.
• The most recent statement for each retirement account: 401(k), IRA or pension, the institution, and whose account it is.

Businesses and professional practices

• The name of each business, what it does, who owns it and in what share, and whether you owned it before the marriage.
• Whatever you would use to put a value on it: a recent tax return, a valuation, or your own estimate and how you reached it.

Other things of value

• Vehicles, with any loan against them.
• Life insurance: the insurer, the type of policy, whose life it insures, and who the beneficiary is now.
• Anything else of real value.

What you expect to receive

• Inheritances or large gifts you expect: from whom, what, and when, as far as you know.

What you owe

• Mortgages, loans, credit cards and any other debt, with the lender and the current balance, and anything the debt is secured against.

What you earn

• Each source of income, and whether the figure is per month or per year.
• Recent pay statements or your last tax return make this quick.

What you want the agreement to do

The questionnaire asks about the terms in plain questions, each with what happens if you leave the default. It helps to have thought about: what each of you earns during the marriage; growth in the value of what you own now; separate money put into a joint account or the home; the home you will live in; debts one of you takes on alone; life insurance; rights at death; and attorney fees if there is ever a dispute.

Files

Statements can be uploaded as PDF, JPEG, PNG or Word files, up to 4 MB each, attached to the item they support. If a statement downloaded from a bank asks for a password when you open it, save it again as a PDF (Print, then Save as PDF) and upload that copy.

Why the figures matter

This office prepares a written disclosure of each party’s property and debts and serves it before the agreement is signed. It does that because disclosure is one of the things a court looks at if the agreement is ever challenged as unconscionable, and because an agreement is easier to keep to when neither party is surprised later by what the other owned.

Reading this website does not create an attorney-client relationship. That relationship begins when this office accepts your matter and you sign the fee agreement.