Divorce in the U.S. surged in the 1970s and 1980s as the baby boomers reached adulthood. As they enter retirement, they’re still splitting up, and it’s having a disproportionate effect on women.
Even as divorce rates for younger Americans have fallen, failed marriages among people over 50 doubled from 1990 to 2010, according to Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family & Marriage Research. As a result, the overall risk for getting divorced in the U.S. has remained constant: About half of all marriages will collapse.
It turns out that this may be part of the reason why about one in five Americans over 65 is working—twice as many in the early 1980s and the most since the creation of Medicare. Unlike divorces earlier in life, later breakups have a huge impact on individual finances, often forcing people to delay retirement.
