Why a Second Marriage Needs Property Planning
A second marriage almost always begins with a more complicated property situation than the first: the spouses may already own property left from a previous marriage, an acquired business or a home — and almost always there are children from the first marriage whose interests depend on the decisions of the parent's new family. Under the general rule of the Civil Code, property acquired during the marriage is the common property of the spouses — and it is precisely this default rule that a marital agreement replaces with a scheme the spouses define themselves.
The point of planning is that decisions are made while no conflict yet exists between the parties and every variant can be considered calmly and on paper: what happens to each spouse's personal property, how the spouses share family expenses, and what passes to each of them on the termination of the marriage — by divorce or by death. Below we describe in detail what the Code gives to this planning instrument — and where its boundaries lie.