When Wealth Planning Meets Divorce

What, what are the big issues that, you know, from your perspective, uh, being in, in the trenches of w- what happens to our beautiful planning when divorce happens?

So look, I, I think that the first thing is that people are planning their wealth when they're married for two, and that is very different than planning on splitting up your wealth, right? And, um, I, I think that we are seeing more and more divorces that are happening when the children have left the house, um, or the apartment for that matter.

Mm-hmm.

Um, because I think that for, for various reasons, which we can discuss, but at the end of the day, no matter how much wealth you have, you're still at usually about half, right, in New York anyway, um, equitable distribution, not necessarily equal.

But if it's a long marriage and you have kids, you're gonna likely have an equal distribution of most of the assets.

And so, um, the bottom line is that if you have, you know, 1 million, you've only got 500,000.

If you've got 20 million, it's only 10.

And, and very different lifestyles and very different, um, economics when you're looking at dividing your wealth in half.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that for people who are in their late 50s and sometimes 60s who are coming to us now, um, in what's called gray divorce, not sure that I love that name, but it's very popular now, um, they are, um, some of them are very concerned about what their planned retirement is going to look like because they had planned it one way, and then they might have had a curveball thrown at them, and now they're planning it a different way, and it could look very different for them.

So that's one, one issue, I would say.

Um-

Yeah

... and then, you know, there are various other issues.

I think that sometimes people confuse marital property with being separate property.

We can talk about that, what that looks like.

Um, maybe they think that somebody else's, some- their spouse's inheritance is theirs when most times, and in New York particularly, um, it is not so.

An inheritance, if you've kept it separate and apart, is, is yours, um, as long as you can trace it back.

And so I think there's various surprises that people, um, have when they are going through a divorce, and they're learning for the first time what it means to divide up their assets.