It’s almost Valentine’s Day, a celebration of all types of love in your life. But sometimes love doesn’t work out, and it’s important to plan ahead to protect your assets from the worst-case scenario.

A common concern for clients is what happens to their child’s inheritance if that child goes on to get a divorce. The fear is that a portion of the hard-earned inheritance left to their child will instead pass to the divorcing spouse. Depending on the state where the divorce is taking place and the nature of the couple’s assets, this is an entirely real possibility, especially in a state such as Massachusetts with its open-ended divorce law.

The best approach to solve this is for your child to enter into a legally binding prenuptial agreement, often called a prenup, before marriage. A prenup can dictate that inheritances are considered the separate property of each spouse. In the case of a divorce, that separate property would not be divvied up with the other joint marital assets but instead stay with the spouse who inherited the assets.

However, sometimes it is too late to get a prenup or the parties involved are resistant to get one. An alternate approach then would be to add protections to your child’s inheritance in your estate plan.

A simple will, trust, or beneficiary designation on an account will give assets to your adult children outright and free of trust. This means that the assets become the child’s assets with no strings attached. In some states, there are some built-in protections for inheritances so long as they don’t become co-mingled with joint assets, i.e., the inheritance remains in a separate account and isn’t used on a joint purchase. However, this is not the case in Massachusetts.

The solution is to give assets to your children in trust. This means that your child will need to ask a trustee to access their inheritance, and the trustee will give the child money according to the standards set up in the trust. A child can be named as the trustee of their own trust share holding their inheritance (meaning they would just need to ask themselves), though for optimal protection another trustee should be named as co-trustee or sole trustee. Because the assets remain in trust, they never become your child’s property. The theory is that these assets are thus not divisible during the divorce.

A couple of caveats: divorce laws are constantly changing particularly in this area as more and more divorcing couples have their wealth established in significant part due to their inheritances. There is no guarantee that a trust set up now will work years in the future. Second, in Massachusetts, a divorce judge divides marital assets “equitably”, not “equally”. A judge could thus give a bulk of the marital assets to one spouse because the other spouse has a large inheritance (even if that inheritance is locked away in a trust). This may not matter much if the inheritance includes assets such as a family vacation house or the like where it’s not just about protecting money from going to the divorcing spouse but rather specific assets.

Even with these caveats, leaving assets in trust for your children is a great way to protect the assets in case your child divorces. Additionally, if your child lives in Massachusetts or another state with estate tax (or qualifies for the federal estate tax), these trust shares provide an estate tax reducing benefit for your child when they pass away.