Property Division — Non-marital Property Attorney in ,

Advice to Protect Non-Marital Inheritance

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If it is a client who is not yet married but is considering getting married the best way to protect a non-marital asset is to get an antenuptial agreement. But a lot of people are not in that situation. A lot of people were married, then they received the inheritance or they never wanted to get an antenuptial agreement but now they’re in a situation where they wish they had one. Then they’re seeing me and we’re talking about – and again, it could be someone who is considering divorce or maybe they, you know it’s been a rocky relationship and they want to know how to protect even though they don’t want a divorce right now. What can they do to safeguard that asset? The court finds it to be non-marital when the time comes or if the time comes. I would say, again, you need to have it be separate. Do not put marital funds or marital effort into it to the extent possible. Sometimes it’s just not possible, but if the asset generates income you would not want it to be reinvested into the asset because then you are transforming the asset into marital components along with non-marital.

You also have to be careful, again, about you wouldn’t want to comingle your inheritance with a bunch of marital money and I’ve seen people do that. Where they get a $20,000.00 inheritance, they put it in an account with $50,000.00 that they had saved. Many years go by, many transactions, it’s almost impossible at that point to isolate what part or what did that $20,000.00 buy. So keeping separate and being conscious of the fact that comingling, mixing things together, using your efforts, let’s say you have an investment account and you are a wizard investor or if it’s an interests of your and you keep actively making it grown. Then the other sides going to say, “Well that was effort. That was your marital effort that increased the value of this asset, so it’s marital.” These are things that you have to be worried about.

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Minneapolis family law attorney Laurie Mack-Wagner discusses non-marital inheritance.

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