One of my colleagues sent me a question from a client who said, “Why should I give my child property only after he or she marries? Wouldn’t that become conjugal property? What if the marriage doesn’t work out?”

Ideally, marriages should last forever. But the reality is, some marriages break down. When that happens, the aftermath may be deep regret about property and other assets that should have remained exclusively in the possession of one party and not the other.

It all boils down to the property regime that governs married couples. Anyone who marries after 1988 is now governed by the absolute community property regime. It’s in the Family Code.

So, what does that mean? It means that when a person enters into a marriage, everything that he or she owned prior to the marriage becomes conjugal property. When you say conjugal property, the ownership is 50/50.

Let’s say the wife brings in a condominium. Her husband now has a 50% share of the condominium. If the husband brings in a car, the wife will now have 50% ownership of the car. So that’s the property regime governing all marriages from 1988 onwards.

But what are the ways in which property becomes the exclusive property of a party? One way your property gets excluded from becoming part of the conjugal property is ownership gained via gratuitous means.

That means a donation or inheritance. There is no payment involved. And that should happen after the marriage.

So, if I am already married, and my parents have donated property to me, I can exclusively own that property. If my parents passed away and left the property to me, then that is also my exclusive property.

Remember that timing the gift is important because anything that one receives before marriage, still becomes part of the conjugal property.

The other way to make sure that property remains with one party is to have a prenuptial agreement. And that has to happen before the marriage.

I can ask my child to have that prenup before tying the knot. With a prenup, you don’t have to worry about the timing of the donation. The couple may decide to have all property brought into the marriage to be exclusive, or go for conjugal property of gains, which means each party will continue to own properties prior to marriage, but anything acquired during the marriage becomes conjugal property.

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WANDA BELTRAN is Metrobank Head of the Accounts Management Division under the Trust Banking Group.