A 26-year-old sales worker's question about whether he should get a prenuptial agreement, and the blunt advice he was given, has sparked a major debate about the necessity of such agreements.
The caller, Michael, dialled into The Ramsey Show — an American personal finance program with an estimated 13.25 million weekly listeners — to ask about a prenup because he and his fiancée have vastly different financial situations.
Based on his description, Michael has roughly $600,000 to $800,000 in total assets. This includes $165,000 across his 401(k) and investment accounts, $150,000 left over in a college fund, $50,000 equity in his truck, and $50,000 given to him by his grandparents for a house down payment. He also earns about $120,000 per year. His partner, meanwhile, has just finished university, is training to be a nurse practitioner, and has roughly $120,000 in student loan debt.
Ramsey's Blunt Advice
Host Dave Ramsey, known for his straight-talking style, gave Michael some blunt advice. “If I were in your shoes, I would get so comfortable with this lady in order to marry her that I don’t need a prenup,” he said. “You don’t have enough net worth to fool with it, okay? If you can’t get $600,000 worth of comfortable with somebody, you don’t need to marry them. If you had $60 million from your grandparents, we’ll talk about a prenup. $600k? No, I wouldn’t.”
Co-host Rachel Cruze pushed back slightly, noting that “people nowadays are getting more and more comfortable with prenups” because people are marrying later with established financial lives. She pointed out that Michael had almost $1 million when adding everything together. (It’s worth noting that $1 million US dollars would be about $1.4 million in Australia.)
Ramsey then told the caller it’s “okay” if he wants a prenup, but urged caution. “I just want you to be really, really sure,” he said. “The problem is everybody throws this subject against the wall as if it solves something, and I don’t want you to think it solves anything. All it solves for is if you divorce. It doesn’t mean that you’ve actually sat down and gotten to know each other. It doesn’t mean that you sat down and agreed, ‘Okay, here’s how we’re going to spend the money. My grandparents’ money that they gave me is going to pay off your student loans when we come home from the honeymoon’. You’ve got to solve for that emotionally.”
A Broader Cultural Debate
Ramsey said he generally takes issue with prenups, seeing them as part of a larger cultural “war on marriage.” “You’ve got to figure it out emotionally, because the only chance you have in a culture that hates marriage for your marriage to last is you’ve got to be willing to die for them,” he said. “You’ve got to be willing to take a bullet for them. It’s all in. Ride or die. The problem with a prenup is it’s kind of got one foot in a boat and one on the dock, you know? And I want you to go all in. If you’ve emotionally and relationally — with some good marriage coaching and counselling — solved for the ‘all in’ part, and you’re ready to write a check to pay off her student loans when you get back from the honeymoon... if, on top of that, you want to do a prenup? Okay. I’m not going to yell at you for a million dollars. But I really want you to think that through.”
Cruze agreed, saying: “I think the downside of people that do prenups — and this is probably a generalisation — is that you’re starting out emotionally saying, ‘Financially, this is mine, and this is you over here’. That can tend to bleed into the marriage. Inside the marriage, we say no, you’re all in.”
Ramsey noted that his opinion on prenups has shifted over time. “The other side that’s interesting, Rachel when I started a long time ago, I just said ‘never do a prenup’ on the basis of what we’ve just been saying,” he said. “But then I ran into weirdness where somebody’s got two or three million dollars and the other one’s broke. And it’s not the person usually — it’s like I find out that there’s a weird brother-in-law or cousin in the mix, you know? It just cleans up the external family. Because with the prenup, you’re like, ‘I can’t touch it, it’s not mine’. So when her crazy brother starts coming at the new husband wanting to fund a business, it’s like, ‘It’s handled. It’s already handled, you can’t get to it’. There’s crazy in every family, and if you think there’s not, it’s you.”
Online Reactions
The video has generated a strong online debate on prenups and the state of marriage in modern society.
- “Prenup simply protects him from disaster. With a 50 per cent divorce rate, who can blame him?” one person asked.
- “For Dave $600K is not a lot of money only because he’s a multimillionaire, but for the average person it’s a lot of money!” another said.
- “It's a 400k net worth. Honestly not high enough for a prenup. I would say prenups start at about 1 million,” said a third.
- “For some reason, Dave does not take into consideration that women file 70 per cent of the divorces,” added a fourth. “This is a real issue for men and not acknowledging that is comical.”
