New Study Highlights the Impact of Divorce on Retirement

While divorce rates for Americans overall appear to be falling, older Americans are still getting divorced at fairly high rates. According to Bloomberg, this has led to some interesting outcomes in terms of how older Americans are working and retiring.

Approximately one in five Americans over the age of 65 are still working, a record numbers. In fact, this is twice as many as in the early 1980s, and by far the most since Medicare was launched in the mid-1960s. Many experts are linking these trends to the divorce rate in the Baby Boomer generation, as these later breakups are forcing people to delay their retirements.

Overall, a greater impact on women

A joint study at Boston College and Mathematica Policy Research also indicates that this higher level of monetary stress is also playing a significant role in the numbers of older women who are returning to the workforce.

According to the study, the later a woman gets divorced, the more likely it is she will be working full time late in her life. The roughly 56,000 women in the study who divorced while in their 50s were about 10 percentage points more likely to be working full time between the ages of 50 and 74 compared to women who divorced before the age of 30.

Additionally, women who were born in the early 1950s were 19 percentage points more likely to be working full time after the age of 50 than women who were born in the 1920s, with factors such as race and education controlled in the study.

There are many other effects that later divorces have on individuals’ finances and retirement outlook. For more information about planning your divorce in a way that protects your financial health, meet with an experienced Nassau County divorce lawyer at Bryan L. Salamone & Associates.