Stephan Shipe Welcome back to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. This week we open with a question from a couple who own three properties across two states and have been letting their kids and grandkids use them whenever they want. Their CPA raised concerns about imputed rental income and gift tax, so we'll walk through where the risk sits. Then we hear from somebody sitting with $12 million in cash after a business sale, weighing I-bonds, a treasury ladder, or leaving things parked where they are. And in our From the Field segment, we sit down with Aaron Thomas, one of the country's leading family law attorneys. We'll talk about prenups — not as a defensive instrument, but as foundational tools for clarity, alignment, and protecting wealth built over generations. So let's start with question one. We own three properties across two states and have been gifting use of the homes to our kids and grandkids. But our CPA recently mentioned imputed rental income and gift tax implications if we're letting family use the properties without fair market rent. And now my wife is convinced we've been doing this wrong for years. Do we really have to charge our kids to use the lake house? It may be time to consider talking to another CPA for a second opinion on this type of scenario. This is kind of crazy. If you have not heard this before — charging your kids to go use the family lake house, imputed rent — it kind of sounds like the CPA read about imputed rental income and doesn't fully understand how that is structured. Generally, imputed rental income is when there's some business use or some gift that's not personal use and you're trying to figure out what the rent would have been for that. Think of it like this scenario: say here at Scholar Advising we went out and I had this beach house and allowed employees to go use the beach house as a perk. In that case, what would end up happening is I'd have to look at what the value of that use would be, and that would possibly be considered a taxable benefit of being an employee here. That's how you get that imputed rental income. So there are a lot of situations where that makes sense. Your kids going to swim at the lake for a Saturday is not the scenario where imputed rental income typically comes in. Now it's possible that maybe there's just more to this that they're concerned about. And the real risk that I end up seeing would be whether or not you're renting out the property for the rest of the year. And even that doesn't necessarily affect the personal use as much as it would affect the business benefits you'd be getting from renting out the property. So if you're taking deductions because it's a business that you're running and you have all of these different tax benefits from having a rental property, then the government's not going to look too fondly upon the idea that you're saying this is a rental property while your kids are using it every other weekend and you're writing it off holistically as a rental property. That's where I'm hoping the CPA is maybe getting confused. And you can go in there and have a little bit more of a conversation about where that comes from. Because I have never heard of a situation where you have to charge your kids rent to go use a personal use property. Generally, personal use would be you using it personally, but also you graciously sharing your property with others without anything in return. And even then, even if there was a concern about gifting, the gift limit for both of you — you and your wife — is $38,000 a year that you'd be able to gift. So I don't know. I mean, maybe these properties are really awesome and you could be renting them out to the tune of $76,000 a year. But if that's not the case, even that from a gifting perspective would be under the limit. But I think that's a stretch. This is a good example of maybe it's time to do some shopping for a new CPA and get some different opinions on this one. We do a lot of tax situations — I'm not a CPA on this one — but this one has a lot of red flags of somebody maybe getting into waters they're not comfortable swimming in and not really understanding the full implications for someone with three properties, multiple states, gift taxes, and everything else that's mixed in. So that's how I would handle this one and start looking at what the actual realistic impact would be for you. All right, and on to our next question. I sold my business 18 months ago and we're sitting on a meaningful cash position — around $12 million that we don't need all that soon, but also aren't ready to deploy. Right now it's split between a high yield savings account and a money market fund. For cash that's probably going to sit two to five years, is there a meaningful case for I-bonds, a treasury ladder, or both? Or are we overcomplicating this? Easy one — I can knock out the I-bonds for you. The I-bond purchase limits are $10,000 a person. It's going to take you a heck of a long time to deploy that $12 million to I-bonds. So you don't have to worry about that as a concern. I think the more realistic question is — and not just one question, I think there are two ways to think about this. One is if you are keeping the cash, where should it be held? And the other part is how much of that cash should you be holding versus deploying? Because I'm a little concerned if you're talking two to five years of keeping this cash on the side, especially $12 million. You sold your business to get that $12 million and that was 18 months ago. So now you're already a year and a half in, you missed out on market returns, and you're about to add five years to that. That's a long time, especially when that alone could cover an entire business cycle. So I think the first question is how much of that do you actually really need to keep in cash and how much of this should you start to dollar-cost average to get some of it deployed? Because unless you had significant wealth before the $12 million hit — which is possible — I would imagine that $12 million is a meaningful amount since you called it a meaningful cash position. And in that type of situation, we don't want to get caught up with inflation catching up with us. I think inflation, while it's a little high now, there are not a lot of signs that it's dropping anytime soon. And if that's the case, no matter what you're earning on the treasury or money market side, you're going to have to subtract out inflation for your real return. And that real return is likely 1% at best, maybe even a little less. So that's what worries me there. Maybe that's not a problem, but I think we need to at least have the conversation of starting to put some of that cash to work in a structured way. I'm not saying you go tomorrow and buy $12 million in stock, but let's start thinking about how much is a good amount of liquidity to hold and that can be higher, right? That doesn't have to mean one or two months worth of cash and then the rest you deploy. You can still hold years worth of cash expenses. But unless you're spending $3 to $4 million a year, I would imagine you have too much cash right now that you could deploy without it hurting your ability to be liquid for the next few years. So that's question one. The next is going to be what to hold it in. So regardless of whatever that number is that you're going to keep in cash, for however much you have there, we have a few options. We mentioned I-bonds — the amounts are too low, we're not going to do that. So we're looking at treasuries or money markets or the high yield savings account. The benefit of treasuries is the tax efficiency, especially if you're a high earner. Depending on how the structure of the business sale went on that $12 million or any future money coming in, you may be jumping up into higher brackets still. Then you're going to get a state tax exemption on the treasuries, assuming you live in a state that has a state income tax — and to be clear, that's state not estate tax. So I like that option better. It's still going to be liquid — U.S. treasuries are one of the few bonds or fixed income securities that you can easily get in and out of. You can easily roll some ladders if you don't want to get too long out on the duration curve. So six- to twelve-month ladders for money market funds are fine. Maybe you throw in some longer-term stuff, but you could build a pretty nice short-term treasury portfolio that's rolling out for a few years and continues to give you that liquidity you're looking for, gives you a yield that's very competitive — especially on an after-tax basis when you compare that to a money market or a high yield savings account. It's a little bit of splitting hairs there on the difference between them because we're talking about really low real returns, not nominal returns. Nominal returns are going to be 4 or 5%, but the real return is going to be less once you start to account for inflation on top of that. So that's something I'd keep in the back of my mind before you start talking about just setting this cash somewhere for five years. Stephan Shipe All right, and next in our From the Field segment, we're joined by Aaron Thomas, one of the nation's leading family law attorneys and the founder of prenups.com. A Harvard Law School graduate, Aaron has represented more than a thousand clients in high-stakes family law cases, including NBA Hall of Famers, Super Bowl champions, and Grammy-winning artists, and is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Prenup Prescription. Stephan Shipe Aaron, welcome to the Scholar Wealth Podcast. Why don't you start off and give us a little bit of background — how you got into the prenup business. Aaron Thomas Yeah, so I have been practicing law since I graduated in 2002. I've been doing family law since 2007, and how I got into it is a little bit of an accident. I was happily practicing criminal law here in Atlanta, Georgia, and a divorce attorney needed someone with trial experience and recruited me into his firm. And I really joined his firm not knowing the first thing about family law and not knowing the first thing about divorce. There was good and bad in that — I was young, I was in my late twenties, not yet married myself. I didn't know many people who had been divorced. My parents will celebrate 60 years this upcoming August. And so I was thrown into this really blind and was shocked to see what it is really like for people going through divorce. The aha moment that I had was that getting married is probably the most consequential financial contract that someone will ever sign in their life, and no one reads the fine print. And so no one really knows, in my experience, what marriage means for your finances until they're sitting in a divorce lawyer's office. And it just struck me that a lot of people could use help joining their finances in a way that was more intelligent and thoughtful than what we usually do. My parents got married at age 21, and the average couple today gets married in their 30s — it's simply a much more complex financial merger. When you're coming in with four or five bank accounts, three credit cards, each have your own car, multiple retirement accounts, student loans, a mortgage, all of those things — whereas our parents or our grandparents got married at 21 with one bank account and a car between the two of them. And so I got into prenuptial agreements as my attempt to help people — yes, avoid messy divorces if their marriage comes to an end, but also to help people understand the gravity of the financial merger they're undergoing when they get married. Stephan Shipe When you talk about that financial merger — I like the phrasing of that — what are the basic tenets of a prenuptial agreement? What are the main things? I guess the better way to put it is, when you're putting this together, what is the main goal? Aaron Thomas At its simplest, a couple entering into a prenuptial agreement needs to decide what's mine, what's yours, and what's ours. And I think that a lot of people assume you get married and everything ends up in the ours bucket, if you will. And the rules around it are a little more complicated than people think. A lot of people know that the general rule is whatever you already own coming into marriage is considered your separate property. If the marriage comes to an end, you get back what is your separate property, and you split what is your marital property — the assets and everything you gained during the marriage itself. Where it gets tricky is when you have your separate property coming in and you get that first paycheck. I like to call it the first paycheck rule. What do you do with that paycheck? You take some of it, you put it into the retirement account you had coming into the marriage. You put some into the checking account or the savings account that you had coming into the marriage. You pay down the mortgage of the condo that you own. You pay down your car note. And now everything that first paycheck touches has an element of marital property in it — it's been commingled. And so if that couple breaks up in the future, trying to figure out what's your marital property and what's your separate property is not as simple as just looking at whose name is on a bank account. Everything has been mixed together, and you see why it takes a year and a half and a team of attorneys to separate couples. There's just an easier way to do it. Stephan Shipe And the big thing that I always hear when working with people about this — when we recommend starting to talk to someone to have a prenuptial agreement drawn up — the question that always comes up, and I'm sure you hear this a lot, is, well, I don't know how to bring that up. How am I supposed to go have that conversation? It's such a horrible topic. We're in love, we're getting engaged, we're going to go have all this. And now you're telling me that a couple of months before the wedding, I've got to go talk to an attorney about how we plan out our divorce. That's the feedback that I always get. How do you get through that process? What do you tell people? What does that process look like when it's done well? Aaron Thomas Great question. And my advice in these situations might be a little bit counterintuitive. I tell people, if you're nervous about it — some couples have already broached the topic, at least as a hypothetical, and you can walk right into it. But if you're not one of those couples where the topic has already come up, I say don't lead with the word prenup. I think that we can all agree that the word prenup has a lot of stigma attached to it even still in today's world. A lot of people get nervous about it and they think exactly what you said and what I thought before I got into family law — we're planning our divorce before our marriage has even started, right? Instead, you lead with what it is that you want to accomplish. You have a retirement account, I have a retirement account. Can we agree that that's kind of like — I get to control how I invest my money, you get to control how you invest your money? And maybe we need to set up a joint brokerage account where we do our joint investing together. Or you're moving into my house and I owned it coming in — maybe you probably don't want to just pay rent to me. You want to get some equity out of it. I probably don't want to lose every penny that I've put into it before we met. Maybe we should talk about how to come up with a way that treats both of us fairly when it comes to the equity in the home. And you start talking about those individual issues, the things that you want to accomplish. And then the prenup is the way that you accomplish what you both agree should be addressed, rather than starting off with the word prenup and your partner's heart stops because they think you're talking about a potential breakup. Stephan Shipe I imagine the harder part — conceptually it's very easy to understand, right? You have two people, they come into a marriage, and what you started off with you're going to get back. I think for most people they understand that component. What I've always found interesting is how you start drafting the shared marital assets and how those get divided, because there are lots of different ways that gets split up where maybe those marital assets are not being divided in an even way throughout the marriage, depending on lengths of marriage and everything else. Where does that complication start to come up? How does that conversation go where you start to look at whether it's ownership or growth in assets and saying, well, that growth is going to be attributed to my half of the marital assets? Is it always as simple as a 50-50 split down the middle, or is there nuance at the asset level or the type of asset level? Where have you seen that start to get more complex? Aaron Thomas Yeah, I think that what a lot of people try to do is come up with something simple — a framework that they can use that does not require a team of forensic accountants to figure out who owns what at the end of the day. And so what a lot of couples will do is use what we call a title-based system, meaning whatever is intuitive before you get married. If an asset is in your name or a debt is in your name, it belongs to you. If something is in joint names, it belongs to the two of you — the presumption being that would be 50-50. And you title assets over the course of the marriage the way that you want them to be treated, so that someone can maintain a separate asset during the marriage if they want, whether that's a bank account or a rental property or a vehicle, or you can put things in joint names. And for most assets, that is going to work. You can have them just belong to one spouse or the other, or have them be 50-50. You want to limit the number of assets or debts that are going to require some kind of fraction. Usually that's going to be a house where somebody's coming in with equity and a straight 50-50 split — or 100% to one spouse and zero to the other — is not going to be fair. And in those situations, there are formulas that we typically use to balance the equity that one spouse is coming into the marriage with against the income that is contributed or the money or resources that have contributed to growing that asset, whether it's paydown of the mortgage or renovations or repairs during the marriage, so that you end up with something that is pretty foolproof and you're just following the numbers rather than trying to guess later on down the road. Stephan Shipe And how much pushback do you get when you facilitate these types of conversations? Because from the basic until-death-do-us-part type of relationship, this is very counterintuitive — especially when you start thinking about marital assets being split and titled differently. From a more traditional viewpoint, everything would be joint and there is no separation. Do you think the openness to that conversation is more a factor of later marriages where assets have been established? Or has that always been the case? And a good comparison would be when you look at families of means where there are already family assets being brought into the marriage. Has that always been the case, or with later marriages are we starting to see that become more common? Aaron Thomas I think you bring up a great point. One difference between couples who get married today and couples who got married 50 or 60 years ago is certainly the age difference. There's a difference between getting married at 21 and getting married at 31 in terms of the assets or debts you've accumulated. But even bigger than the difference in the numbers on your net worth statement is that couple who's getting married at age 30 or 35 — not only do they have differences in their assets and debts, they have a decade or a decade and a half of their own financial habits and financial practices that have gotten baked in since they moved out of their parents' house. They're used to having autonomy over their own money. And I think that that is a big difference in today's couples versus people who got married at age 21. If you have been paying your own bills, you've been making your own decisions about how you spend your paycheck, you may not want a lot of oversight over how you do your discretionary spending after you get married. And so I think that a lot of people are open to the idea that maybe not everything will be joint. Maybe 90% of our assets will be considered joint and we each get 5% of the household income that peels off into our separately titled bank accounts that we can do whatever we want with. I can get the new iPhone every single year if I want to. And my wife, who doesn't care about electronics, she wouldn't do that. But she's going to go out to eat for lunch every day, and I'm a brown bagger, and I wouldn't spend in the way that she does. And we both get to maintain our own autonomy over discretionary spending while we make joint decisions about the bigger things, like how we invest in our brokerage account or what type of home we're going to purchase. And so I think that people are a lot more open when they realize that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. It doesn't have to be that every single penny is a joint asset or you live your lives completely separate. I don't think either of those are necessarily healthy for a couple that gets married in their 30s. And so I think that people are looking for that happy medium where, yes, let's build a financial life together, let's feel like we're on the same financial team, but we can still have a little bit of autonomy over a little piece of our financial lives. Stephan Shipe You brought up the financial behavior aspect of this. Because one of the things you've said before is these prenuptials can be set up not only for divorce but also to incentivize or almost guarantee behavior throughout a marriage — whether it's financial check-ins or anything like that. How does that actually work? Because I think that's a piece that a lot of people can easily overlook. Like we were talking about at the beginning, you hear prenup and you think divorce, right? You go right there if that's the only reason you're putting this document together. Can you talk a little bit about how prenuptials can be used in other ways throughout a marriage? Aaron Thomas Yeah, the way I look at a prenup is it is a document that governs the financial rules of yes, if you get divorced, but also of the marriage itself. I like to look at it like a partnership agreement. If you are going into a business with another person, you are likely going to want to spell out all of the rules of how that partnership is going to work — each person's financial responsibilities, each person's financial rights in that partnership. And yes, of course, that business partnership agreement is going to have a termination clause that says what happens if the partnership doesn't work out, but that's not the goal of the partnership agreement. The goal is to make sure that things move smoothly while the partnership is going on. And I think that we can take those same principles into a prenup. Yes, of course, any prenup is going to spell out how do you divide your assets if the marriage comes to an end — without having to spend two years of your life and 20% of your net worth in a courtroom. Certainly any good prenup should do that. But the best ones are going to spell out what are your rights and responsibilities during the marriage itself? How is the income going to flow? Are things going to go into separate accounts and then you contribute to the joint expenses into a joint account? Or is all of the income going to go into a joint account and maybe you each get a little allotment that comes out every month? If you have kids coming in, maybe I don't want my income going towards your child support or the private school expenses. So that's a conversation that we can have early on that is an investment in reducing any arguments or misunderstandings later down the line. And so a lot of people these days are putting rules and expectations into their prenups around spending limits. Maybe we're going to discuss anything over a thousand dollars that comes out of a joint account before that expenditure is made. And couples will put that into their prenup so that there's no "I didn't know, I didn't think you'd care" type of arguments later. Stephan Shipe What's the recourse on that? If someone goes and spends over the thousand dollars in the joint account, how does that get brought up? Do you go to the documents at that point, or does that just get used later on if this turns into a divorce? Does that actually come up? It's fascinating to me — those types of rules being mixed in. Aaron Thomas Right, I mean, I think that the penalties are up to the individual client, but most of the couples that I work with find a lot of value just in stating what the expectations are upfront. And there's a value in putting it in writing. It's just like if you have a lease for an apartment and there's a $25 late fee — are you going to drag the person into court over $25? Probably not. But it sets the expectations and governs behavior. 99% of the time you're not going to need to enforce it through the power of a court because you've laid out those rules ahead of time and everybody knows what the rules of the game are. And I think that that's 90 to 95% of the value. And then yes, a lot of couples will write in, all right, if you make an expenditure that's over X amount and you didn't check with me first, then you owe that money back to the joint account. Or maybe if we break up, I get that money off the top of the joint assets. But the real value I think is in having those assumptions turn into an actual framework that avoids the arguments. In the financial space, I'm sure you are aware just as much as, if not more than, I am that finances can be a big source of tension in marital relationships. And it's best to get clear on what your expectations are upfront than it is to let things fester and fall apart and then try to repair it after the fact. Stephan Shipe Yeah, I love the comparison to a partnership agreement, because that's always what you hear about partnerships, right? You create a partnership agreement, you go through all of that, and the hope is you never have to go back to it. Because the day you have to go look back at the partnership agreement, it's over — things are falling apart to the point where once you go to the books it starts to become a problem. And that seems very much in line with what you're saying there. You had mentioned as an example that 20% of your net worth could go toward going through the whole court process and everything. Do you have an idea of what the ROI would be on a prenup in the case of a couple that has one versus one that doesn't? Is there anything you look at and say, well, this is a 10% problem, or this is a large problem — just to frame the benefit of actually having documents in place? Aaron Thomas I think that a prenup could be the best insurance that a couple could buy because the downside is almost unlimited. I have worked on divorce cases where each spouse has spent over a million dollars in legal fees and other litigation costs over the course of years-long litigation, not to mention the toll that it takes on people emotionally and psychologically going through litigation like that. And to think that a lot of that litigation could be avoided with a document that is going to cost maybe $10,000 to $15,000 — and that's for high net worth individuals. People who are of modest means can get an agreement done for well below that amount. It really makes a lot of sense from a financial perspective, certainly. And if you told people — what are the divorce rates, 40%? If you told someone that they had a 40% chance of their house burning down, you couldn't keep them from purchasing the home insurance on that piece of property. So it definitely makes sense from that perspective. But I also think that it's an investment in the health of the relationship itself. For a prenup to be enforceable — and this is true in all 50 states — each spouse has to disclose all of their assets and debts to each other for the agreement to be enforceable. And just that one act of financial transparency can be revolutionary for couples. I'm sure you've worked with couples where the conversation they're having with you is the first time they know what the other person has in assets or debts, right? And so it's the same thing with me. A lot of times it's that first opportunity they get to have a clear picture of what their partner's finances look like. Stephan Shipe Absolutely. Aaron Thomas And just breaking down that wall can be really helpful and open the door to them talking about, okay, how are we going to pay for expenses? And what are we thinking about in terms of private school or public school for the kids? Or what is our retirement plan? Or what are we looking at in terms of a mortgage? Just breaking down that wall makes it a lot easier for the couple to have ongoing financial transparency in their relationship. Stephan Shipe I never thought too much about that. It seems obvious — if you have the financial transparency throughout a marriage, it's really good, you avoid conflict, at least everyone's on the same page. And I don't know if this data exists, but the academic research mind is kicking in on this one — are there studies that show whether or not marriages with prenups end up being more successful or have lower failure rates than without? Aaron Thomas They are starting to do studies, and a lot of the data is thin. Up until probably year 2000, about 3% of marrying couples got prenups. So the vast majority of people did not. Now today, they're estimating it's closer to 15%. There's no centralized database, so all of these things are polls and estimates. And I think that in the years to come we'll have a lot better data. One thing is for sure — there's a lot more transparency when it comes to finances in the couples who do have prenuptial agreements. And just kind of intuitively you can understand why couples would want to avoid situations where they find out that their partner's credit score is not great when they're applying for a mortgage, or they get surprised by a bunch of revolving debt or IRS debt when they file their joint taxes together. These things are best addressed early and often rather than in the midst of a crisis. Stephan Shipe When they don't know what the assets are. Like I'm thinking about multi-generational wealth. You have a situation where someone's getting married, maybe they have some of their own assets, but their family has significant wealth. And this is a conversation that regularly gets brought up — we may recommend something like gifting or paying for the down payment on your kid's home, right? All these things that sound great. And then we'll get questions around: well, what happens if I give this money after they're married? Who owns that? And then how do you protect the previous generation's money going down into a relationship through a prenup for that couple? Is that a separate partnership agreement at that point, essentially — more of a partnership agreement through trusts and everything from the parents to the recently married kids — or is that encompassed in the prenup as well? Aaron Thomas Typically, it's going to be encompassed in the prenup as well. Now, interestingly, even when there's not a prenup agreement in place, by definition — and this is pretty universal across the United States — inheritance and gifts that are made specifically to just one spouse are considered separate property, even if that money transfers in during the course of the marriage. That said, it's still usually helpful for people to have gone through the prenup process because then they understand the rules. One of the most heartbreaking things that I've seen is a client who received a decent-size inheritance from her parents when one of them passed away. She thought, I would love to have no mortgage on the house. The house was titled in joint names. She paid off the mortgage and immediately transferred that money from her separate property into the marital property, got divorced a year later and had to split that inheritance she'd just gotten with the partner that she was divorcing. And these are the kinds of unintended consequences that a prenup can absolutely protect against. If you pay it into the house, you get it back first thing off of the equity, or maybe you get a stake in the house that grows equal to the percentage that you paid down of the mortgage. There are many different ways that you can structure it, but absolutely — inheritance and protecting family wealth, whether it's been transferred to you or not, are things that are goals of a lot of people getting a prenup and absolutely achievable in these documents. Stephan Shipe Yeah, you just described the nightmare of many of my clients — paying for their child's home or helping them pay down a mortgage or debt, that exact scenario. So it's good to know there are some protections out there. From a transparency aspect, it gives even more credibility to not only transparency between the couple, but also the parents starting to have more of a conversation — maybe not opening up the account statements completely, but saying, hey, we plan on gifting some money or paying for a house, you should have a prenup in place to make sure that those assets and future assets are protected. I think that's great advice. How does that shift when you start to have blended families? You mentioned a little while ago the concept of somebody bringing kids into a marriage — who's paying for what and all of those scenarios. Is it common for the prenup to allow assets to flow through to children from a previous marriage of a spouse? And I know that tends to come up as well — I want my spouse to have enough money to live off of, so you have all these different trust structures in place. But then the principal amount or the remaining amount of the accounts — does that typically flow back, or does it get distributed out amongst the children of the surviving spouse? Aaron Thomas Yes, great question. When I'm working with a couple where there are children from a previous relationship, that makes the delineation between mine, yours, and ours that much more important. A lot of people assume that a marriage means that everything should be joint, but particularly when there are children of a previous relationship, that is just a ticking time bomb — having child support or college expenses for a child from a previous relationship coming out of the joint account of the new marriage. And so in those situations, for me, it's that much more important to make sure that the spouse who has financial obligations to a pre-existing child has sufficient resources that they can take care of all of those obligations without having to ever touch or dip into the joint asset pool, whether that's the checking account that's paying for the month-to-month bills or the retirement savings that belongs to that couple. That's an argument that can absolutely be avoided by some pre-planning on the front end. And especially when you're talking about multi-generational wealth, these kinds of conversations that involve not just the marrying couple but parents and other generations are so difficult to have. And it's so difficult to open up those conversations. And a lot of people choose the path of least resistance, which is, you don't bring it up at all until you are absolutely forced to do so. I'm sure it's the same thing in your field. Stephan Shipe Of course. Well, everyone knows that right when you're going in for a marriage, having a bunch of opinions from family members is just a key to happiness — especially going into those types of conversations. Aaron Thomas Right. And this event — the conversation about the prenup, how you're going to manage money during the marriage, how you're going to pay for children coming from a previous relationship — if nothing else, it forces those conversations to happen at the time that they need to happen, when the couple's getting married and joining their finances, rather than it coming up later as, well, I took the money to pay for the private school expenses because I had to and that's what I always do. Rather than it being after the fact, I'm not saying that these conversations are going to be 100% smooth and that there won't be any bumps whatsoever, but it's definitely a lot better to have them when they're in the hypothetical pre-planning stage than after the fact. Stephan Shipe So I know we started off today talking about how there's this negative connotation toward the prenuptial and everything. So as we wrap up today, do you have a story — and I know you've worked with a lot of high-profile clients, so as confidentiality would allow — where a couple went through the process and it worked out really well, that you kind of point to and say, see, this is why you do it, this is the positive side of these types of scenarios? Aaron Thomas Yeah, I've worked with some couples in some of the most challenging situations — where one person is coming in with significant wealth and the other one isn't. And I think that a lot of people assume that a prenup is only a tool to protect the wealthier party, and that the person who is less moneyed is signing an agreement and all they're doing is signing away their rights. And I would want your listeners to know that there is always a middle ground that can treat both sides fairly. And there are a million things that the less moneyed spouse can ask for. If they're going to be giving up a potential career, they can ask for alimony protection. They can not just receive money in the event of a divorce, but very often what we'll do is write in that they'll get a certain allotment or income replacement during the marriage itself. So they may receive a certain amount that gets transferred from the higher-earning party into their own bank account so that they can be building their own wealth in their own name during the course of the relationship. You don't have to wait for some potential payout in a divorce, and you certainly don't want to have a situation that incentivizes divorce by making it so the only way the lower-moneyed spouse can get access to funds is by filing divorce papers. And those are great situations because you take a couple who didn't know how they were going to manage this transition to a life together — without all of these uncomfortable conversations — and one spouse doesn't want to be going and asking the other one for permission to make spending decisions. You have all these awkward situations. And there's almost always a creative solution that protects the person who has assets that legitimately need protecting, but also makes the person who is less wealthy coming into the relationship feel secure, feel protected, feel like they can have some autonomy over their own financial life as well. And those kinds of situations are very satisfying to play a part in. Stephan Shipe Well, Aaron, thank you so much for coming on today and providing some clarity to a very opaque topic for a lot of people. I appreciate it. Aaron Thomas Thanks so much for having me on. It's been a blast. Thank you. Stephan Shipe That's our show. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next week.