Consider Yourself Forewarned
With all that newfound time to spend with your spouse after retirement, the golden years should be golden for your marriage, right? Unfortunately, statistics suggest otherwise. In 2019, approximately 17% of all divorces occurred in couples aged 55 and up. In comparison, in 1990 only 10% of divorces occurred among partners over the age of 50.
Selling a business and retiring can bring sweeping emotional struggles to business owners. One study found that 75% of business owners were unhappy in their first 6 to 12 years after retirement. This extended unhappiness can poison your personal relationships. Unless you are emotionally prepared, the years after selling your business can wreak havoc on you and your marriage. And if your spouse asks for a divorce before you are prepared to retire, you may have to sell your business early to split the assets.
Why Gray Divorce Can Devastate Business Owners
Divorce can be especially tough on business owners who often depend on their business to fund their retirements. If you now have to split your assets, some of that retirement security suddenly begins to erode.
That’s only the beginning. Add on attorney’s fees, the costs of relocation, buying a new home and new furniture, and the situation gets even worse. Plus, if your spouse hasn’t built up their own retirement funds, you can bet that they’ll go after every penny they can get from you.
The best way to avoid this nightmarish fate? Take steps to preserve your marriage and prepare yourself emotionally for life after selling.
Can This Marriage Be Saved?
The Covid-19 shutdowns prompted people to rethink what they wanted out of life. Many chose to retire earlier than originally planned. Some long-married couples, including Bill and Melinda Gates, decided to go their separate ways.
With longer and healthier life expectancies, many Boomer-age retirees start wondering if they really want to spend the next 20-30 years with the same person they spent the past 30 years with.
When married couples spend decades building businesses and raising children, they may neglect their primary relationship. They get so preoccupied with separate activities that they fail to recognize cracks in their marriage.
But fractured relationships are hard to miss when you sell the business and retire, removing the day-to-day distraction of running a business. With all this time on their hands, some hard-driving entrepreneurs start to wonder “Is that all there is to life?”
Unless you’re a multi-billionaire, dividing assets late in life can put a real dent in your ability to make a fresh start.
Preparing Emotionally
To become emotionally prepared for retirement, you must decide who you want to be and what you want to do going forward. Part of that involves including your spouse in these conversations.
After all, you will suddenly have 50 to 60 newfound hours per week to fill. What activities will you do together? What activities will you do separately? What will the average day look like for you as individuals and as a couple?
Before deciding divorce is the only way, see if the relationship can be salvaged. Try to find at least one defined activity that you can do regularly with your spouse. New activities can help re-invigorate the connections needed for a healthy relationship.
In fact, working through your differences in a healthy way can actually bring you closer together. It all boils down to communication and honesty.
Without preparing emotionally, retirement can cause a rift in your marriage. Make sure to reflect on the things you care about, talk to your spouse about it, and create a plan for your future together. That’s the way to build a purposeful new post-retirement life.
Recommended Resources
Insider: Gray Divorce – Getting Divorced Later in Life – Is on the Rise
My soon-to-be-published memoir illustrates how profoundly the failure of my first marriage affected me personally and professionally. It created tension within my family and diminished my ability to buy the family business when my father wanted to retire. So when I caution about the impact of gray divorce, I am sharing hard-won life lessons. Subscribe to my newsletter to be the first to know when the book is available.