Why Must Read Divorce After 50: Your Guide to the Unique Legal and Financial Challenges?

The last chapter of this book is “Survival Stories” and consists of divorce survivors who responded to the authors questionnaire with up to a few paragraphs. Some interesting statistics emerged: 28 women survivors responded, 2 men responders, and two responses were of indeterminate gender. So the survivor ratio among respondents is 7 to 14 women for every man. Only one response covered financial ruin from divorce (which it euphemistically called “a more frugal lifestyle"). And since financial ruin is a MAJOR factor in divorce, yet only one of these survivors stories mentions it – it infers that financial ruin could be a common trait of those who DO NOT survive divorce. Conclusion: for every woman who survives divorce at least 7 (or 14?, or 5?) men over the age of 50 do not survive divorce. If you doubt it – try Googling it. There is plenty on no fault divorce reducing women’s suicide rates – but none about the other side of the equation: men’s suicide from financial ruin (if not the utter humiliation of) having to hand a lifetime’s worth of hard earned money over to a women who worked considerably less hard to contribute to their financial partnership, and yet got an automatic entitlement that she did not earn through her hours in the workplace. If you manage to find anything at all about men’s divorce suicide rates, they will be subsumed under the catch all category of “distraught over divorce”. No one dares touch upon how our laws encourage a gold digging behavior in women who have tired of their mates, dispossessed them of all that they could late in life, and drove them to suicide from a financial ruin that they were too old to recover from. In fact, our present divorce laws actually ENCOURAGE this kind of behavior. Despite the overall usefulness of this book (hence the 5 star rating), “Divorce After 50”, “Survivor’s Stories” did not resonate with me.