How Much Do Binding Financial Agreements Cost?

by Brampton Keats | 2 min read

Looking For A Cost-Effective Alternative To The Expensive Lawyer Route? In this article we’ll explain the secret to saving $1000s in legal fees, while achieving the same result

The goal of having a Binding Financial Agreement is simple – to protect your financial future with a legally binding agreement. However, if you don’t know what options are available you will waste unnecessary time and money by taking the wrong path.

Once you discover what your options are, you’ll realise that there is a more cost-effective and quicker way to secure a Binding Financial Agreement.

NB. When we refer to Binding Financial Agreements, we are also referring to Separation Agreements. Under the Family Law Act, these agreements are called “Financial Agreements”. They all mean the same thing.

The 1 Question That Will Determine How Much You Will Pay

The biggest determinant in what you will pay for a Binding Financial Agreement boils down to one simple question:

Am I willing to prepare a Binding Financial Agreement myself before seeing lawyers?

Preparing a Binding Financial Agreement yourself using a professional template as the basis, and then having lawyers proof-read will drastically cut the amount you have to spend. If you choose this route, you would typically spend around $150 on a professional template, prepare that yourself, followed by 1 lawyer meeting for them to proofread, give advice and verify (as you have already prepared the agreement – this meeting is usually only 1 hour). So for 2x 1 hour lawyer meetings (1 for each party) + 1x $150 professional template, you would generally spend under $800 in total.

The alternative is to use lawyers from the beginning to prepare a Binding Financial Agreement themselves using their own templates – this is obviously a lot more expensive. Generally speaking, lawyers will charge per client at least $3000-$5000 to draft a Binding Financial Agreement. If your situation is complicated – this will cost a lot more.

The Secret To Minimising Your Costs Is Maximising Your Preparation

Most couple’s financial situations are not that complicated – they are much better off preparing drafts of the agreement themselves before seeing lawyers. Furthermore, with something as relatively straightforward as a Binding Financial Agreement, and given the right Binding Financial Template company – this should be easy to do.

Lawyers will typically ask you questions that you already know the answers to, for example when did you break up, how do you want to divide your real estate and so on. It doesn’t make much sense paying expensive hourly rates to get lawyers to input this information into their own template, when you can do the exact same yourself at no cost.

For most people – once you understand the procedure – it is really not that difficult to calculate and divide your financial situation. We discuss the process in an article about the secret to a property settlement agreement in Australia

Remember How Expensive Wills Used To be?

As with most things in life, there are better solutions if you just know where to look. If you ever had a Will made pre-2000s, we are sure you can remember how expensive and time consuming it was. You had to research the right lawyer, set up an initial appointment, follow that up with a series of additional meetings, back and forth, back and forth until you finally had your Will created. It was a big hassle, and because of all the time you spent with the lawyer, you used to pay a fortune.

Today, you can download your own a legitimate DIY Will Kit from a reputable legal template company and complete the whole procedure in a fraction of the time and cost.

Binding Financial / Separation Agreements are no different. By removing those troublesome and expensive areas of the legal process, we realised we could making the whole process a lot easier for everyone. The usual procedure is for lawyers to: 1) gather information from their clients, and 2) input this information into their own pre-made template. So we thought, what if we simply removed that step and gave everyone around Australia access to our template directly?

For more information, please view our main page

ABOUT BRAMPTON KEATS

We are an Australian-based company that specialises solely in divorce / separation education, templates and products. Our agreements have been prepared by experienced lawyers with backgrounds in top-tier law firms, who have been admitted to both the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Victoria.

For more information about our templates, please click here.