"When you and I get married, we mix our assets. What I'm seeing in numerous cases today is that I'm being hired by half of the couple, to manage their assets," Riedl says. "I don't even see his assets."

Oftentimes, the wife has liquidated her whole estate and has moved in with her second husband, who has set aside much of his wealth for his children but is taking care of his wife's day-to-day expenses-and then some. But having come to the marriage with some of her own money, which she now doesn't have to spend, she can invest it, and that's where Riedl comes in.

"I'm able to invest her money as if she's a 30-year-old instead of a 55-year-old, because she's being taken care of. There are no requirements on her assets," Riedl says. "Her longer-term needs will only come into play when he dies."

Debra Opri, a family lawyer who practices in California, New York and New Jersey, likens a marriage to the merging of two companies, like Continental and United airlines. Couples must determine who's going to be the CEO, who's going to be the CFO and who is going to be on staff. To that end, she believes it makes sense for each party to have separate advisors.
"You have a business: You go to work, you earn income, and you invest it. You're a business entity. So how do business entities protect themselves?" she asks.
In her own marriage, Opri decided from the outset to use her own accountant and file her taxes separately because she wanted to protect her business.
"Frankly, I don't want someone telling me what to do and how to run my business and my funds," she says.

Opri says she's represented a lot of successful women over the years who have felt the same. They feared that once they merged their finances with that of their husbands, their money-and the decisions surrounding it-would no longer be theirs.

"My advice is always, 'Keep your accountant. Keep your lawyer. And let him keep his,'" she says, noting that Lucille Ball always had three sets of everything: one to look after her, one to look after him, and one to look after both of them.

"She basically said, 'I have everybody watching everybody,'" Opri says.

Christine Moriarty, a financial planner in Vermont, says she couldn't disagree with that approach more. "If you agree to keep everything separate, what kind of marriage do you have?"

Moriarty says she has among her clients a couple who always kept everything separate, and now they're getting divorced, in part because they kept everything separate.

That said, she doesn't advocate merging everything. The decision is couple-specific and item-specific. For instance, Moriarty, 48, got married three years ago to her husband Larry, 69, and they each kept the attorneys they had before the marriage, but they hired one estate attorney for both of them. They file their taxes jointly because it makes financial sense to (her husband does the tax returns because he's an accountant), but they've maintained their old landline phone numbers from before the marriage. Her calls are forwarded to the house phone, which is his number, and the phone rings differently for her number.