Baby boomers are having some second thoughts about the whole “till death do us part” thing. Instead of waiting for someone to land in a coffin to go their separate ways, they’re going to the courthouse.
Longer lives have married people wondering whether they actually want to spend their now-extended golden years with some not-so-golden feelings about the person next to them. A growing number of people over 50 — especially those over 65 — are deciding that they don’t.
The face of divorce has a lot more wrinkles and gray hair than it used to, and that brings with it a fresh set of financial calculations and complications. The challenge isn’t just what to do with the kids and the house. It’s dividing up retirement savings that were supposed to support one household, rewriting wills and trusts, and overhauling estate plans. It’s also digging up 25-year-old paperwork and worrying about what happens to your inheritance if your 70-year-old Dad dives into marriage No. 2.
For families, a late-in-life split can be a financial quagmire. As the US enters the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history, gray divorce may quietly reroute trillions of dollars and reshape the retirement many people have envisioned.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re high net worth or if they have fewer resources,” says Susan Guthrie, a divorce attorney and mediator based in Chicago and the host of the Divorce & Beyond podcast. “You’re talking about a lifetime of creation being completely upended late in the game.”
The overall divorce rate in America peaked at 22.6 per 1,000 married women in 1980 and has generally declined since then, hitting 14.2 per 1,000 in 2024. Break it down by age group, however, and the picture shifts: Divorce has fallen among people in their 20s and 30s since 1990, but for people over 50, it’s doubled, and for those over 65, it’s tripled. Older people still get divorced at lower rates than younger people, but nowadays, nearly 40% of divorces involve adults over 50.
Do baby boomers love leaving their spouses? Not entirely, but experts say the reasons for this surge in silver splits are tough to pin down. Longer life expectancies mean the prospect of being in an unhappy marriage for a longer period can be daunting. Now that most middle-class households have two incomes, both partners may feel they have greater financial independence to take a leap. The stigma around divorce has declined, too.
You’re talking about a lifetime of creation being completely upended late in the game.
Whatever the exact combination of motives, divorce attorneys say they’ve seen an uptick of older people showing up in their offices. Frank Perrone, the cochair of the matrimonial law practice at Tarter Krinsky & Drogin in New York, says he’s working on two gray divorce cases, including one where the parties are in their 80s. The wife wants to go out, travel with her grandkids, and spend money, while the husband doesn’t want to leave the house. The conflict has caused a lot of financial animosity between the pair, so they’ve decided to go their separate ways and split everything up.
“It’s very sad,” Perrone says, but “everybody deserves to try to be happy.”
Divorce is always messy, but the logistics of it after decades together can feel disastrous.
For younger couples, divorce tends to focus on child custody and support, alimony, and what happens to the house. Because people are early or mid-career, they have more runway to rebuild their assets. For older people, their high-earning years are largely behind them, and if one spouse hasn’t been working for years, the prospect of jumping back into the workforce is daunting. There’s a lot more to divvy up and unwind.
“The major issues often focus on income, retirement assets, pensions, 401(k)s, annuities. The biggest asset may not be the house anymore. It’s more likely the retirement account,” Perrone says. “It’s not just the end of the marriage, it’s basically, especially in long-term marriages, restructuring almost an entire lifestyle.”
There’s lots of little bugaboos and caveats, whatever you want to call them, that most people don’t know to look for.
The post-divorce math is often brutal: A single-person household is much more expensive to run than a two-person household. Retirement accounts are slashed, and newly single Americans may have to reevaluate how they’ll spend their time and money in their later years.
Gray divorce tends to hit women harder financially. Research shows women experience a 45% decline in their standard of living compared to a 21% decline for men. While times have changed, many women still spend years at home caring for their children, which can dampen their earnings prospects and career advancement even if they do stay in the workforce. They also have longer life expectancies, which may mean they ultimately need more money for retirement.
Sharon Klein, president of family wealth at Wilmington Trust in New York and the head of its divorce advisory practice, says that lingering traditional gender roles mean that women sometimes don’t have a clear picture of their families’ finances or even have credit histories. They need a crash course in managing their money.
“Women need to get educated about what they have,” Klein says. They’re often inclined to lean on friends and family who’ve been through similar experiences, and while that support is invaluable, those networks aren’t equipped to handle the administrative nightmare of a late-life split. “That’s tax issues, legal issues, investment decisions, making decisions too quickly,” she says.
Laws around how assets are divvied up vary state by state, and every divorce is unique. But couples often underestimate how many moving parts there will be: taxes, illiquid assets, estate planning, and more.
“There’s lots of little bugaboos and caveats, whatever you want to call them, that most people don’t know to look for,” says Jeff Judge, a managing partner at Chesapeake Financial Planners.
People may update their wills post-divorce to remove their former spouses and not realize that there are other accounts whose beneficiaries also need to be updated—think trusts, 401(k)s, life insurance. Or, they’ll forget to change powers of attorney, and no one wants their ex deciding whether to pull the plug at the hospital. People believe that they split assets fairly upon separating, only to find out later that because of different tax liabilities on different assets, they wound up getting the short end of the stick.
Judge once worked with a woman who, years after her divorce, realized that their “equal” split was not so equal because she’d gotten accounts with a higher tax burden than her husband. He also recalls a client who didn’t realize until after her husband died that he’d never changed the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went directly to his ex-wife.
“It is very common in a gray divorce for them to have left assets in the name of the ex, even if they’ve been divorced a long time and even if they paid a lot of money during the divorce,” says Craig Parker, assistant general counsel of Trust & Will, a website that helps with estate planning. “The estate plan is a separate stop.”
There are all sorts of novel hiccups that come up in later-in-life divorces. Parties may not be able to prove that inherited property is only theirs because they no longer have a copy of the will that left it to them. Prenuptial agreements weren’t as common decades ago, and even if one existed, people sometimes can’t find them.
Adult children sometimes push their parents to fight out their divorces in court, says Sophie Spears, an associate attorney at Mosberg Sharma Stambleck Gross LLP in New York, instead of going through mediation or settling. Not only is that route “inconvenient, uncomfortable, and invasive,” but it’s also expensive.
Divorcing couples — particularly women — may also not like that courts won’t be amenable to including gifts to grandchildren and travel with family in their expenses for potential maintenance payments. Judges don’t care about how much people want to leave their kids. The court bases its determinations only on how much the spouse needs for essentials such as housing, food, and generally getting back on their feet.
Blended families, in particular, are when gray divorces get hairy. In many cases, gray divorces are actually second marriages, says Michael Calogero, a partner at Cohen Clair Lans Greifer & Simpson in New York. The parties are “not just focused on dividing those assets of this second marriage, but also preserving and protecting particular assets and property for their heirs, who will be different than their spouse’s heirs.” This is particularly acute among high-net-worth families.
Things can get even dicier if the gray divorce is followed by a gray marriage. If Mom or Dad remarries and retitles their assets or home to their new spouses, children may be disinherited. People, understandably, want to make sure their new spouse is taken care of in the event that they die, but their kids may not love that someone they’re not related to winds up with a chunk of money they thought was headed their way. In many states, even if a person leaves everything to their children, the spouse has a legal right to a percentage of their fortune, which can then be rerouted to their own kids. Families avoid planning around it because it’s uncomfortable, and then they wind up in court.
“When it comes to money, all of a sudden, when a parent dies, the children want their money immediately, and a good relationship between the children and a surviving step-parent can change really quickly,” says Todd Bornstein, a trust and estates attorney at Selzer Gurvitch Rabin Wertheimer & Polott, P.C. in Maryland.
Gray divorces represent a confluence of major life stressors all at once — broken relationships, retirement, estates, inheritance, declining health. It can induce a scarcity mindset. People have to think of everything from family holidays to long-term care differently.
This financial anxiety can hit even at the highest levels of wealth. Spuds Powell, managing director at Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management in California, points to one client who was left with $75 million after her divorce. She still lives a “life of frustration,” he says, because she was previously married to a billionaire. She wants to try to maintain her lifestyle, but she’s also worried about overspending since she’s no longer clued in on her ex-husband’s estate plans for their children.
“In a world where the exes are not communicating effectively with one another, how do you try to handle the uncertainty around what ultimately that means for inheritance for kids?” Powell says.
You don’t get divorced suddenly.
To be sure, most people are not dealing with millions of dollars. They’re just trying to make it through and keep the disruption to a minimum.
Valerie Montague, now 69, was 54 when she left her marriage of two decades. Her husband was a financial manager and always handled the couple’s accounts, so she prepared quietly.
“You don’t get divorced suddenly,” Montague, who lives in Maryland, says. “I had started saving, and I told myself, ‘When I get to $10,000, I’m going to leave.'”
After her mother died in 2009, Montague inherited the proceeds of a condo sale and a life insurance policy. She used it as a financial life raft to rent an apartment in the same school district so that her two teenage daughters could finish high school undisturbed. She was laid off from her job soon after, however, and spent six months unemployed before landing a new, lower-paying role.
Montague and her ex agreed to wait to sell the house until after both of their daughters graduated from college, so they could use equity lines of credit to help pay for tuition. That meant that the most difficult part of their divorce came years later, when the house finally went on the market.
“We argued over every little thing,” she says — the inspection, the contract, the fact that after she moved out he’d finally taken out a loan for the kitchen renovation she’d wanted for years. “Having to deal with him so much during that period was very stressful,” she says.
The sale closed shortly after her youngest daughter finished college in 2015, and Montague used the proceeds to buy her current condo in 2016 — five years after her divorce was finalized.
Montague retired last fall, but she still runs a side business helping people get their financial affairs in order. It’s inspired by her experience managing her estate — and, in part, by her divorce. “If you believe you’re going to get divorced,” she says, “plan for the financial situation.”
Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.
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