"Shark Tank" star and investor Kevin O'Leary says he "forbids" couples to merge their finances, warning that lacking your own financial identity could spell disaster should your personal life take a turn for the worse.
"You must, in this society, maintain your own financial identity. You have to. Because 50% of marriages end in divorce for financial stress over the first five years of marriage, and even if you have a long-term situation and anything would happen to your spouse, such as death… [and] you don't have your own financial identity, you're in the wilderness in America," he told FOX Business' Stuart Varney on Monday.
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"You must have a credit rating and a financial identity and an account and your own investment accounts just for your own survival, so when people tell me, 'We're going to merge our account,' I said, ‘What, are you nuts? Absolutely not.’" he continued.
O'Leary said he forbids the shared financial practice in his own family, adding that he "forces" prenuptial and cohabitation agreements.
"I want financial due diligence on significant others because I'm a realist. I deal in the real world," he told Varney.
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Adding to the conversation, he argued in favor of prenuptial agreements for addressing unequal financial accounts, pointing to his own role as an investor in HelloPrenup and asserting that the platform forces people to ask important financial questions of their potential partner.
"If you're building that financial pillar together, it's because you want that harmony to last. I'd argue the prenup helps a lot more. I really do," he said.
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The O'Leary Ventures chairman has previously urged couples to keep their financial identities separate, with a post to X on Sunday calling for investment accounts, ETFs, stocks and bonds to be kept in an individual's own name.
"You do not have to merge that with your significant other. Ever," he said in the video shared with the post. "There's absolutely no need to do that."
