What Happens if You Win the Lottery Before You Get Married?
If you are married, then you know what a (hopefully) fantastic experience getting hitched is. And if you aren’t yet married, then you still have the day of your wedding to look forward to. Between the cake, the venue, the guests, and the one you love, wedding days are some of the most special days that we experience. However, what if someone were to throw a spanner in the works? What if, right before you were meant to say ‘I do’ or even years before you met your future spouse, something massive changed? In this article, we will look at what happens if you win the lottery before you get married.
Effects of Money on Marriage
This is because money is such an integral part of our lives, and even the lives that we hope to one day have with our significant other. Arguments and fights about money can become commonplace in a marriage and can easily lead to divorce if not dealt with correctly. Unfortunately, many people think that having excess money (such as lottery winnings) will mitigate these problems. However, in some cases, the problems are actually exacerbated rather than alleviated. This may be because of different financial styles between two people or even their underlying attitudes toward money.
The problem with all these scenarios is that they ultimately could lead to the separation between you and your spouse. This leads to a generally messy separation of shared assets as well—which, unless correctly protected from the start, could include money (such as lottery winnings) that you had before getting married.
Winning the Lottery Long Before Getting Married
If you are lucky enough to win the lottery a while before you get married or even before you meet your future spouse, then you can consider yourself rather lucky. This scenario gives you time to adjust to having the money, work out a plan for what you would like to do with it, and think of how this money might affect your future relationships. It also allows you to acclimatise yourself to your new wealth—something that plenty of previous lottery winners say has to happen at some point.
By the time you have completed all these steps, the chances that you will be confident of where your lottery winnings stand once you are ready to get hitched are quite good. Thankfully, by this time, your money should already be established, and it should be easy for you to protect it.
Winning the Lottery Right Before Getting Married
On the other side of this scenario is if you win a massive lottery jackpot right before you are about to get married. This may cause a landslide of sudden problems that you may not even see coming. In fact, it is recommended that you postpone the wedding immediately upon verifying that you are the jackpot winner.
Doing this may seem extreme (or even harsh), but it is often necessary in order to complete all the steps that we mentioned above such as establishing your money and ensuring that you have come to terms with your new wealth.
While it may sound like a rather childish reason, there is a pretty good reason for this drastic action—it allows you to deal with the money and enter your new marriage without having to worry about money (or sorting it out) while you’re deal with adapting to being newly married at the same time.
How to Protect Your Lottery Winnings When Getting Married
Let us be honest; this is probably the question that you are actually looking for an answer to. Most people who are wealthy want to protect their money when getting married—especially in cases where the other spouse is worth significantly less financially. They want the security that their money will be safe no matter what happens and that on the off chance that their future spouse is marrying them just for their material wealth, they will not be able to leave with any money that was not theirs to begin with.
A prenuptial agreement is a legal contract entered into between you and your-soon-to-be spouse. As a lawyer usually administers it, the document is legally binding and can hold its own weight in most courts of law. The purpose of this document is to ensure that no one side of the marriage party can gain anything more than what they contribute to the marriage at the time of the wedding.
This means that should a marriage end in divorce and need to be dissolved; each party will leave the marriage with the things that they brought into the marriage and nothing of what the other person brought into it. Only the things and assets that were gained during the duration of the marriage will be able to be equally shared by the two parties.
These documents are commonplace in today’s society and, while there is some resistance from marital partners in certain circumstances, most people understand the rationale behind requesting a prenup agreement before entering into a marriage. For lottery winners, these agreements are incredibly important. This is because large sums of money often tend to attract people who are interested only in the material assets of a winner rather than anything else. These people will often try and gain a winner’s fortune through the means of a ‘failed marriage.’
Conclusion
While winning the lottery will undoubtedly help many marriages, whether new or old, there are limits to this statement. As mentioned, winning the lottery may also bring harm to the sweet matrimony between two people—as it did to Denise Rossi and her husband Thomas, UK Lotto winners Roger and Lara Griffiths, and many others. Thankfully, due to a straightforward agreement that can be acquired rather quickly, you will be able to protect your lottery winnings before you get married so that in the (hopefully unlikely) event that your marriage fails, you will not be able to lose your fortune.
