How a financial planner can support you through divorce

Divorce means unravelling years of shared finances while you’re processing profound emotional loss – and making sound decisions during this time can feel overwhelming. A financial planner offers calm, impartial support through this transition, helping you protect your long-term security without adding to your emotional burden.

If you’re going through a divorce, financial decisions are probably coming at you thick and fast – just when you’re least equipped to make them clearly. Should you sell the house? Can you afford to buy your partner out? What happens to your pension? Can you survive on one income?

These questions matter enormously because they’ll shape your security for years to come. But right now, they’re likely to be tangled up with grief, anger, exhaustion, and the hundreds of other adjustments that come with the end of a marriage.

“A divorce is like an amputation,” the novelist Margaret Atwood wrote in her novel Surfacing, “you survive, but there’s less of you”.

That rawness makes it harder to think clearly about money – yet the early decisions you make can have lasting consequences. This is where having a financial planner as part of your support network can make a real difference. Not to make decisions for you, but to help you see your options clearly when everything else feels overwhelming.

The financial cost of divorce

Many of the decisions made early in the divorce process are financial ones. Should you sell the family home? If not, can one partner afford to buy the other out? How do you start unravelling joint banking or pension arrangements?

Research from the University of Edinburgh released last year found that some of the 47 divorcees interviewed reported feeling “blown off course” from their financial plans. Some felt they needed to reconsider the timing of their retirement, extending their working lives for longer than they’d originally envisaged. “Starting again” was a common theme for both partners, referring to taking out a new mortgage at a stage in life when they would expect to be close to paying this debt off.

The research also highlights how divorce frequently reinforced “pre-existing gender inequalities in pension savings”. The trade-off in divorce agreements will often see the husband take the pension while the wife stays in the family home. The research states: “Many financial decisions around divorce were not primarily based on rational calculations, but were led more by an emotional response to uncontrollable events surrounding the marriage.”

This is why impartial guidance is imperative when going through something as emotionally complex as divorce or any kind of separation. Not just lawyers to handle the legal process, but a financial planner who can offer steady, impartial support – helping you make decisions with a clear head rather than in the heat of the moment.

Women are often overlooked

We’ve supported many clients through divorce, and the process hits everyone differently. There’s a natural tendency for clients to try to hide or downplay their feelings. As financial planners, we make sure we remain sensitive to the emotional rollercoaster they may be experiencing, but keep to ourselves.

One area that often goes unrecognised is the intersection between menopause and divorce. Research from 2022 from the Family Law Menopause Project found that 73% of women said experiencing the menopause was a factor in marital breakdown.

Many couples decide to separate in their 40s and 50s, which coincides with the age at which most women experience the perimenopause and menopause. The same underlying issues – anxiety, depression, fatigue – that contribute to relationship breakdown can also affect how women approach discussing their divorce arrangements. For some, their personal finances may even seem less of a priority when negotiating the future.

Recent years have seen much more open conversations about the menopause, but it’s still an area that doesn’t get the attention it deserves in financial planning.

More broadly, we know that women can be under-represented in the divorce process – an aspect that we’re always trying to address at AAB Wealth. The financial planning community is still heavily male-dominated. Many clients will have stories of advisers elsewhere who spend their time talking to the man and making little effort to accommodate the views or intentions of the spouse. If financial knowledge isn’t equal within a couple and one partner feels out of their depth, a good financial planner will ensure both parties are heard and supported.

How having an AAB Wealth financial planner can help:

• Cashflow modelling brings clarity to uncertainty. One of the most important ways we can support is by helping you visualise your finances after divorce. The road ahead can look a lot less daunting when you can actually see the numbers. This puts to bed some of the biggest worries: How much will the adjusted arrangements affect your long-term plans? Will the divorce mean having to put off retirement? Can you afford to stay in the family home?
• We help you explore different options, not just accept a default split. Divorce and separation are often seen as a binary split – joint assets divided in two, one partner takes the house, the other keeps the pension. It’s not always so straightforward. For example, it may be possible to share the rights each partner has to a pension through a Pension Sharing Order (PSO), a court order that legally divides the pension. We can model what different arrangements would mean for your future, so you understand the trade-offs before you agree to anything.
• We help you adjust to a new financial identity. After years of shared finances, managing money independently can feel daunting. We talk you through the best options for assets you may have sole ownership over for the first time and discuss how your new circumstances might affect your tax arrangements. This isn’t just about the immediate practicalities – it’s about helping you build confidence in your financial future.

Money is only part of what makes divorce difficult and emotional. But financial uncertainty can make everything else feel harder.

Having a financial planner as part of your support network means you don’t have to make these decisions alone. We help you see your options clearly, so you can move forward with confidence – even when everything else feels uncertain.

If you’re going through a divorce or separation and need help navigating your finances, please get in touch with us today.