Pre-Marital Due Diligence

No competent buyer signs a purchase agreement before reading the seller’s financials, and no competent person should marry before reading their partner’s. This is not suspicion; it is the same exercise the prenup will force anyway (section “Prenuptial and Postnuptial Agreements”), done early enough that what you find can still change the terms rather than the wedding date. Exchange the documents in both directions, on the same day, and read them:

• Federal and state tax returns for the last three to five years — which reveal income, business interests, rental losses, foreign accounts, and any installment agreement with the IRS that the conversation would not have.
• A full credit report from all three bureaus, plus the current balance and rate on every debt: cards, auto, student loans, private notes, tax liens, judgments, guarantees signed for a business or a relative.
• Statements for every account, retirement and taxable, plus the plan documents and grant agreements for any equity compensation.
• A one-page net-worth statement each, dated and signed. That page becomes the exhibit that proves what was separate property (section “Separate Property, Community Property, and Commingling”) if it ever matters.

Their Debt Can Reach Your Paycheck The separate-property rules protect what you own; they do not protect you from what your spouse owes. In a community-property state the community estate is liable for a debt either spouse incurred before or during the marriage ( Cal. Fam. Code §910) — and your earnings are community property, so your salary is on the table for a debt you never agreed to. The statute leaves exactly one door open, and it is narrow: §911 shields the earnings of a non-debtor spouse from the other spouse’s premarital debt, but only while those earnings sit in a deposit account the debtor spouse has no right to withdraw from, and only while they stay uncommingled with money that is reachable. Marry someone with $400,000 of defaulted private debt, deposit your bonus into the joint account, and you have just funded their creditor. If either of you brings meaningful liabilities to the marriage, the account architecture is not a preference — it is the protection.

The Rest of the Pre-Marital List

Decide the domicile deliberately

Which state you live in on the wedding day picks your property regime, and moving later drags the old assets into the new rulebook (section “Separate Property, Community Property, and Commingling”). If one of you is relocating anyway, the order of operations is worth an hour of thought.

Model the student loans before you file jointly

Income-driven repayment computes the payment off joint income when you file jointly, so a marriage can raise a monthly payment by four figures without raising anyone’s salary. Run it both ways under the current post-OBBBA repayment rules (section “Income-Driven Repayment, Post-OBBBA”) before choosing a filing status — this is the most common legitimate reason for a couple to file separately.

Buy the insurance marriage now requires

Marriage creates a person who depends on your income. That means term life sized to the obligations you are jointly taking on (section “Term Life Insurance”), own-occupation disability coverage on both earners (section “Disability Insurances: Covering Your Lost Income”), and a personal umbrella policy written over both of you (section “Umbrella Insurance”) — because from the wedding day forward, a judgment against one of you can be collected from the community.

If either of you is not a US citizen, decide the tax residency question

A US citizen marrying a nonresident alien may elect under IRC §6013(g), “Joint return by husband and wife” to treat the nonresident spouse as a US resident for the whole year, which buys the joint brackets and standard deduction — at the price of subjecting that spouse’s worldwide income to US tax and pulling their foreign accounts into FBAR and Form 8938, “Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets” reporting. The election, once revoked, cannot be made again with the same spouse. Model it against filing separately, and read the transfer-tax half of the problem in section “Titling and Beneficiary Designations”.

Do the irreversible estate moves before the marriage gets complicated

Structures that depend on a spouse — a SLAT above all — are far easier to build while the marriage is healthy and far worse than useless when it is not (section “Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs)”). If a liquidity event and a wedding are both on the calendar, sequence them with counsel rather than by accident.