<p>I agree with TwistedKiss and Columbia . . . No way would I let in-laws pay off my debt or accept great wads of cash from them. Too much risk that they would perceived they were “owed” input on future events like child-rearing, where to buy a house, etc, because they “bailed me out.” Too much risk that it will be raked up in every future argument. Basically, too much risk of strings attached.</p>
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<p>I don’t know the legal answer to your question about a prenup excluding debt. But my feeling is that when you marry someone you buy the whole package–warts (student loans or whatever) and all. If someone can’t do that, then maybe they shouldn’t get married. Problems occur when couples don’t talk–but even then, it’s easy to think that love conquers all. When my H and I got married neither of us had any assets or debts, but even if we had–I’m sure I would have said it doesn’t matter–we can work it out. What’s probably more important than discussing debt is knowing a potential spouse’s attitude toward money. My H and I have similar views, which has served us well. I’ve got girl friends whose husbands have different views of how to spend money than they do. I can’t imagine hiding purchases from my spouse, but I have a friend who does that all the time. She even has her kids hide their purchases from Dad because they all think he’s a cheapskate??? I would find that an awful way to live.</p>
<p>“When you get married isn’t any debt brought to the marriage legally now both of your debts? Can a prenup that states you are not responsible for your spouses premarriage debt legally be binding?”</p>
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<li>No. 2. Yes (but it likely isn’t necessary, because of 1.). As a gross generalization, what you bring to the marriage remains yours; what you earn (or incur) during the marriage is shared.</li>
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<p>That being said, in practice, Bromfield is right. In a healthy marriage where spouses support one another, it’s effectively shared debt.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>In actuality it becomes a shared debt during the marriage, but a person should protect him/herself and not let the debt become a communal debt in case of divorce (by refinancing the debt during the marriage).</p>
<p>Thank you for the above answers. I googled the questions and was sad to find conflicting answers everywhere. I came away agreeing with Hanna’s answer. So a huge college loan debt continues to belong to the party that took the loan.</p>
<p>So the good news is that if the the marriage ends in a quick divorce at least the one with the loan still has to pay it all back. Seems fair.</p>
<p>I’d marry a doctor with large student loans. No problem there. Probably a lawyer too. But a geography major with 55K in student loans? This suggests someone stupid. I would explain to my child that someone unwisely borrowing money is probably stupid in other areas of life, but that most doctors I know are financially well off and that it would be worth a few years to sacrifice and pay off the loans.</p>
<p>JMHO.</p>
<p>No, I think community property states would rule that your debt is the marriage’s debt.</p>
<p>One friend has a daughter who married during college to another college student. The parents have decided to continue to pay her tuition till her graduation. They have also offered to pay the husband’s tuition so that he can finish on time. The couple can then use their earnings to pay for living expenses.</p>
<p>Of course, tuition at this school is pretty cheap (under $5K per year), but I thought that my friend was being big hearted and generous.</p>
<p>Another viewpoint:
My parents gave my husband and me significant financial help when our children were young.
One set of grandparents gave my parents an allowance while my father was in professional school. The other set gave them a car.
My great-grandparents provided housing to my grandparents until they were able to build their own home. This was in the early years of the depression.
I am pretty sure the great-great-grandparents gave my great-grandparents the land on which their house was built.</p>
<p>Providing financial help to my children and their spouses when they are starting out is not an effort to control them. It is my responsibility and obligation. I am paying it forward. I hope they do the same.</p>
<p>*No, I think community property states would rule that your debt is the marriage’s debt. *</p>
<p>No. Only debts incurred DURING the marriage are shared debts in community property states. However, if a prior debt is refinanced during the marriage, it can become a shared debt.</p>
<p>That only makes sense. Otherwise, a person could innocently marry someone with a huge loan and then have the person divorce them and then demand that you pay half of his loan. That would sure be a quick way to cut one’s loan in half - lol.</p>
<p>A gray area could be credit card debt. If a person enters a marriage with say - $5k debt on his Visa, but keeps using that card during the marriage (making payments, etc) and several years later the balance increases to $15k, it would be harder to argue that the entire debt wasn’t now community property debt because there has been a “mixing” of debt.</p>
<p>My parents gave my husband and me significant financial help when our children were young.
One set of grandparents gave my parents an allowance while my father was in professional school. The other set gave them a car.
My great-grandparents provided housing to my grandparents until they were able to build their own home. This was in the early years of the depression.
I am pretty sure the great-great-grandparents gave my great-grandparents the land on which their house was built.</p>
<p>Some families (especially certain ethnic groups) operate this way. My dad’s Italian family operated this way. It is an admirable way of doing things as long as there isn’t an assumption that “strings come attached” with the help. Helping those who need help doesn’t mean that you can dictate what they buy, what they wear, how they raise their kids, which house they’ll live in, what church they’ll go to, etc.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids: I would never argue that being debt free isn’t preferable. My position is just that it is just one of many, many factors, and one I wouldn’t lean on. Of course I would prefer that no kids in the family had any debt. I am just not that worried about it, nor do I want to give it much thought.</p>
<p>Would I have been able to take off? Sure. Because much of the debt is put on hold when when someone is unemployed. And we did pay back the $17K.</p>
<p>There is one solution: not getting married. I didn’t want to marry H because I was already divorced and didn’t want another marriage. H did. When he lost all the moeny he did, I wish I had prevailed because he could have gone bankrupt. As it was, we couldn’t at all because too much money was in our house, er, actually my house.</p>
<p>Sigh.</p>
<p>Well, now almost every creditor has been paid back, one kid is done with college, another a junior, so it will all work out. </p>
<p>My greater fear than an in-law is that I can’t talk my own daughter out of taking on huge debt for law school. I think given the state of the legal profession she should attend CUNY and have very minimal debt. She doesn’t think she’ll get a job she wants to do then. And so we go around and around.</p>
<p>So my own D is going to expect more support than an in-law. If I have no control over her decision, which I don’t, I can’t hope to have any control over the spouse discussion.</p>
<p>BTW: Her BF, whom she lives with, has no debt. She does, but I am paying it. It’s a minimal amount of Stafford loans that are my responsibility.</p>
<p>I have a third cousin who is one of 7 siblings. He was the child of immigrant parents that owned a corner grocery store back about 40 years ago. His uneducated parents supported all the children from their business and they all lived above the store. When my cousin was in his very early 20’s he met a beautiful young lady. He was still working in his parents grocery store. He and the young lady were becoming very serious and this caused great concern for both sets of parents. My cousins parents thought she was a gold digger because she was so beautiful and loved pretty clothes and her parents thought he was just a “blue collar, working class bum”. Well the working class bum surprised everyone when he purchased his first piece of investment real estate. Her parents believed it was a fluke and that he still had no potential. The couple was married without the blessing of the parents on either side. Within five years he purchased car wash businesses and and they had a child. Their real estate purchases were beginning to rack up and they purchased addional businesses.</p>
<p>Fast forward thirty five years…This couple has five amazing children all grown with children of their own. My cousin and his five own roughly 35 properties in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood and several in Manhattan. They have acquired a great deal of wealth from their business endevers and are probably the most happy couple I have ever known.
How did they acqire all the properties and real estate, they borrowed. They could never have done what they did had they not borrowed money. They invested in their future and believed that they could be successful. They are not just extremely wealthy they are kind and loving and very generous to their children.
This is one of those stories that I remind my kids about every so often. Is it a scary situation, yes, without a doubt. I would be very concerned if one of my kids was amassing this amount of debt but I think most of the billionaires out there have similar stories of the debt they took on to make their dream a reality.
By the way he is not a “blue collar bum” anymore. He polished up very nicely. He knows that it was his beautiful wife right by his side guiding him in the importance of the finer things in life when he needed to meet with investers, bankers, and clients. Her parents nearly went to their grave still thinking he was a bum because he did not have a college degree, even though their daughter was living on a private Island.</p>
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<p>Different families are different. Some families can help others without their being strings attached. Other families – well, there are strings attached. </p>
<p>The whole concept of “I wouldn’t let you marry someone with $200,000 in debt,” though, is quite appalling – I’m not sure how I would “let” or “not let” my kids marry the person of their choice. If I otherwise liked the person, felt that his or her debt was part of an overall effort to better himself or herself, what’s the problem?</p>
<p>Agree with Pizzagirl that our days of being able to control our kids’ choices are long gone! 
But I do think that being forewarned is being forearmed. If you know that you are marrying someone with a substantial amount of debt and the kind of lifestyle you’d have to live to pay that debt off, then there will be fewer divorces based on unmet expectations. </p>
<p>Ignorance is definitely not bliss in this case.</p>
<p>Gifting grown children money is often part of good estate planning. I would hope that my daughter’s future spouse has enough business sense to realize that and not begrudge her. I ask for nothing in return just as my husband’s family asked for nothing when they sent him gifts for estate planning reasons.</p>
<p>If your adult child fell in love with another adult who had a disabled sibling, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would have to support the sibling in some way (whether it was staying in the local area, putting them in a home, paying for a companion, helping shoulder out of the ordinary medical expenses, etc.), would you “forbid” your child from marrying this person because of the costs of the sibling? Or make it a disabled parent for that matter.</p>
<p>^^^ I am having deja vu. Didn’t we have a discussion about this hypothetical issue, pizzagirl? I seem to recall thinking that if the parents did not make reasonable plans for their disabled child and were able to do so, that would be selfish to expect the functional sib to have to care for the disabled sib. However, that said, if my kid were to fall in love with someone who had the moral makeup to be willing to take on that responsibility, that is a good character quality to have.</p>
<p>^^ To clarify, In case my above post was confusing, I wasn’t meaning you and I specifically had discussed this issue (though maybe we did!! I don’t recall) but that I remember thinking through the issue someone posed on another thread a while ago about the possible responsibility of caring for a disabled sibling. I think it was on a thread about moocher family members (since unfortunately I have a lot of experience with that particular subject) – maybe it was in that thread about the parents who wanted their kids to pay them a monthly allowance so they could maintain their lifestyle (boat, lake house, etc) that they clearly couldn’t afford, and so that dad, who had retired, wouldn’t have to go back to work. What ever happened after that family pow wow? I recall the parents trying to put the kabash on the family meeting, but don’t recall if they took responsibility for their finances. Anyone remember?</p>
<p>The reason I bring that story back up is that there are lots of potential financial issues that can surface in a marriage. Certainly student loan debt is one (and carries the obligation to repay, in contrast to the opp’ty to “just say no” to some family members), but there are many others. Neither my H or I had any debt when we married, but we have each had family members who have looked for handouts and expected others to fund their lifestyle and/or fiscal mismanagement. Certainly if we were already dealing with our own debt this could have aggravated matters, but even going into a marriage without debt didn’t prevent the possibility of having to deal with potential financial issues. We have also had to help a parent (mine) who is, sadly, outliving his money. This is an ongoing responsibility.</p>
<p>So certainly if at all possible it is better to go into a marriage with fewer cards stacked against you (and financial issues are often a major contributor to failed marriages) so if possible, agreed that it would be better to not have to take on someone elses big debt. That said, if the partners have similar views about money management and financial planning, these issues can be dealt with. Student debt doesn’t have to be a deal breaker in a relationship. For me the only deal breaker was smoking. I would never marry a smoker. Period.</p>
<p>Again, no one is suggesting that a parent would “forbid” their child from marrying a person with large student loan debts.</p>
<p>The thread’s title is…how would you feel…</p>
<p>The same question could be asked…how would you feel if your child was going to marry… </p>
<p>someone w/o a college education,
someone with several unsupported young children from a previous relationship,
someone with a very different religion,
someone whose very vocal politics are the exact opposite of my child’s,
someone who doesn’t seem able to be gainfully employed,
someone with a “difficult” temperment, </p>
<p>and, of course, some bad things…like drinking problems, drug problems, criminal issues, etc. </p>
<p>Parents can have “feelings” about any and all of these things, but we certainly can’t forbid anything. And, we know that. This is just “talk” :)</p>