Marriage Contracts

A marriage contract ensures that your values and ownership are estimated correctly and determines what type of separate property to be attached to the individual values. The marriage contract must be signed by both you and your spouse and registered in order to be valid. A marriage contract may be drawn up both before and after you marriage.

Even if it is not particularly romantic before getting married, you ought to consider, whether you want your future marriage to have community property or separate property, or perhaps a mixture of the two. If you wish to share everything you own – also any property owned by each of you prior to your marriage – you do not need to take any steps, as your marriage will then be subject to the general rules on community property.

In that connection, however, please note that community property does not comprise your pension savings. The amounts of any such pensions may be substantial, but unless you and your spouse have drawn up a marriage contract as to the sharing of pension rights, you will only, as a rare exception, be entitled to a share of your spouse’s pension savings in case of divorce.

Should we draw up a marriage contract?

The larger the difference in each of your properties on the contract of marriage, the more important that you discuss this issue. A marriage contract will prevent – a perhaps unreasonable – division of property in case of divorce.

Similarly, a marriage contract ought to be considered, if one of you has a positive property, whereas the other one’s property is negative. In such situation, it may be costly, if the spouse with the negative property dies first, and there is no marriage contract on separate property. If the wealthy spouse dies first, a marriage contract combined with a personal renunciation of inheritance from the indebted spouse may also minimize the values payable to the creditors and enable any children to inherit a larger share.

Should you wish to reduce the inheritance of any separate children, a marriage contract combined with a will and testament may be a solution. A marriage contract may help you to distribute the inheritance among the children in the reasonable way preferred.

As a rule of thumb, you will require a marriage contract, if you can say “yes” to one of the following questions:

• Do you or your spouse have any children from previous marriages (separate children)?
• Is either or both of you self-employed?
• Is there a material difference in the amounts of your and your spouse’s property?
• Are any of you in material debt?
• Do you prefer to control by yourself, how to divide your pensions in case of divorce?

Price

Marriage contracts cost from DKK 2,500, ex. VAT.

You can read more about marriage contracts under Separate property; Pensions and Gifts by marriage settlements.

Should you have any questions to the above, please feel free to contact us by telephone +4570151000 or email to: mail@70151000.dk