Questions people ask
Where is a prenup kept?
The short answer
A prenuptial agreement is usually held by the attorney who drafted it, by one or both spouses, or in a safe deposit box or private vault. Whoever holds it, the original needs to survive decades and stay producible by the person who needs it.
The longer answer
Each of those holders has a weak point. An attorney's file depends on the firm, and firms merge, close and purge old matters; no firm owes you custody of an original forever. A spouse who holds it is holding it for both of you, which becomes awkward the day you disagree. Both spouses holding separate signed originals is sometimes done, and then there are two documents to keep track of instead of one.
Many agreements end up at home. Anything kept there faces what the house faces, and fire, storm and flood are only the obvious risks. The less obvious one is a separation, when both people still have keys and only one of them may still live there. Moving the original to a car, an office desk or a relative's closet shifts that risk without removing it.
A workable rule is simple. Each spouse knows where the original is and can reach it without asking the other. That sounds obvious. Yet the original often stays wherever it landed on the day of the signing, and one spouse has not seen it since.
A box rented in one person's name, or in the name of a trust, meets that rule for one side. Where both people want equal footing, the choice between a joint box and two separate ones is worth settling at the start, while the two of you still make that kind of decision together.
When the agreement and the couple are in different states
People move. An agreement signed in one state is often, twenty years on, sitting with a firm in a city neither spouse lives in anymore, or in a filing cabinet two moves removed from where it started. Nobody decided that. It happened one box of belongings at a time.
Distance does not have to decide where the original sits. You can mail your documents to us; we place them in a box for you and mail the key back, if that is the route you want. Visits are by appointment at 3562 N Ocean Blvd in Fort Lauderdale, and every renter is identified against government-issued photo ID. A vault a thousand miles away is not the right answer for everyone, and for someone who will want the agreement in hand next month it is the wrong one.
Wherever it ends up, write down where the original is and who can reach it, and keep that note somewhere other than with the agreement. If the drafting attorney still holds a set, a short letter confirming what they have belongs with the note. Intake at the vault ends with a signed inventory, and the copy you keep records what went in and when.