While consultants are not lawyers, so cannot provide legal advice, they can raise the issue—and the types of questions that need to be addressed—so that they are prepared to negotiate with their attorneys to develop. pre-marriage or settlement.
This includes what each person’s assets and debts are, but also what their short-term, mid-term and long-term plans are, so they can develop a baseline that they can revisit from time to time. .
“They need to think about things like: Who’s going to watch the kids? What happens when you change your mind? It’s about normalizing the conversation, and that’s really important,” she said. “People stop talking and then turn a blind eye. They hope for the best, which is a very bad idea.”
Rubach has a checklist of questions she asks customers to make sure she has covered a complete baseline of what might arise. It includes each of the roles and responsibilities of the couple, and what each of their career potentials are. It also includes how many children they are going to have and who is going to stay at home with them, what it looks like, and what a return to work might look like for that person. But, it also considers how a child may need to adjust if a child has additional problems and needs to continue to provide care that that parent needs. Affects ability to return to work.
“What are they going to do? How are they going to talk about it? It’s like setting the rules of the game,” Rubach said. “It sets aside things that can get really emotional because If you can’t talk about them when you’re still friends, then what?”
