The tour was booked for two. A one-bedroom in an independent living community, close enough to the grandchildren, with a dining room, a shuttle to the medical center, and a waiting list they’d finally reached the top of. By the time the paperwork came around, only one of them was signing. Ending a marriage at 68 doesn’t much resemble ending one at 38, and the difference isn’t mainly emotional. It’s arithmetic.
Divorce after 60 isn’t unusual anymore
Among Americans 50 and older, the divorce rate has roughly doubled since the 1990s, according to Pew Research Center. Among those 65 and older, it has roughly tripled. Most of these splits aren’t dramatic. People describe them as an overdue correction — something they’d been postponing since the last child moved out, or since retirement put them in the same house for the first time in decades.
What’s different is the runway. Someone who divorces at 38 has thirty working years to rebuild. At 68, the assets are already on the table and there isn’t much prospect of adding to them. One household becomes two, and the fixed costs don’t halve when the people do: two sets of property taxes, two insurance policies, two cars, two utility bills.
The biggest asset usually isn’t the house
For most couples this age, it’s the retirement account. Dividing a 401(k) isn’t a matter of agreeing on a number over the kitchen table — the plan administrator generally won’t move a dollar without a qualified domestic relations order, a separate court order that has to be drafted properly and approved before anything happens. And the starting point for the split depends on where you live. Community property states begin from an even division of marital assets; equitable distribution states aim at what’s fair, which isn’t always the same as half.
The mistake family attorneys see over and over is the clean-sounding trade: one spouse keeps the house, the other keeps the retirement account, everybody shakes hands. On paper the numbers match. In practice, one person now owns an illiquid asset with a roof that will need replacing and taxes that keep climbing, and the other owns the income.
The same problem, handled differently abroad
It’s worth knowing this isn’t dealt with identically everywhere, which matters if you have family or assets overseas. Courts in England and Wales can make a pension sharing order that transfers a percentage of one spouse’s pension directly into the other’s name, and the approach to dividing pensions on divorce treats them as an asset built jointly during the marriage rather than the property of whoever’s name appears on the statement. Different mechanism, same underlying truth: in a long marriage, the retirement money is usually the thing most worth getting right.
Two things worth checking early
If the marriage lasted at least ten years, you may be able to claim Social Security on a former spouse’s record once you’re 62 and unmarried — and claiming takes nothing away from them or from anyone they’ve remarried.
Second, if your long-term care plan quietly assumed a spouse would handle the first few years of help, that assumption needs rebuilding. Unpaid care from a partner is the invisible line item in almost every retirement budget. Without it, paid home care or assisted living tends to arrive years earlier than expected, and it arrives as a bill.
A plan built for two
None of this is an argument for staying. People who leave long marriages late in life rarely say they regret it. But the plan you built at 55 was designed for two, and it needs redrawing for one — ideally before the house sells and the accounts are divided, while there’s still something to redraw.