Prenup-tick: Younger generations are more comfortable with prenuptial agreements

Prenup-tick

‍It seems that more millennials are declaring ‘I have’ before saying ‘I do’. Prenuptial agreements — legal contracts signed prior to marriage that detail how assets will be divided in the event of divorce — are on the rise, even among those without multi-million dollar holdings to protect (as in Jeff Bezos’s case).

Made famous by countless celebrity settlements, prenups appear to be breaking into the mainstream: a recent survey for Axios found that half of US adults were open to signing a prenup — up 8% from the year before. This was especially prominent for younger generations, with 41% of Gen Z and 47% of millennials who are engaged or have been married saying that they’d entered a prenup.

‍Bride before a fall

‍The increase in prenups follows the trend of millennials marrying later in their life (the median age of first marriage is now 27 for women and 29 for men, up from 20 and 23 in 1960), suggesting that they have more time to accumulate assets — which they’d like to protect just in case — before they wed.

Even if all these legalities don’t sound very romantic, they might just be helping Americans to tie the knot. CDC data showed that, following a rock-bottom marriage rate in 2020 of 5.1 per 1,000 population in the US, rates of nuptials bounced back to 6.0 the following year. But it might take an even greater force than countering a pandemic-borne slump for modern marriage to take its place at this generations’ altar: the highest rate (16.4) ever recorded was observed in 1946 — the year after WW2 ended.