There is an article in the Telegraph http://bit.ly/YOJuSW about women relying on joint savings on retirement. This has an impact when people divorce after a very long marriage. One of the most stressful things for women is going into the next phase of their lives financially unprepared. Women who find themselves single having spent 30 years or so in a marriage, have not historically, prepared themselves for retirement. They have assumed (all evidence seeming to corroborate that assumption) that having been around for the long haul of spending most of their adult lives with their partner, that they could retire together and depend on joint savings. Joint savings, meaning, savings that the bigger bread winner contributed more to. Women may have been the homemaker, brought up the children and whatever work they did part time or otherwise, paid less. Without the complication of divorce, joint savings could be depended on and retirement was faced together. On divorce, women come face to face with the financial worry that the savings they thought they could rely on now have to be fought for. There are no winners. Women feel anxious about how they will manage and men feel that they have done all the saving and earned the money and are reluctant to share it. A lose lose.
