“Women 63 and older who go through gray divorce have a poverty rate of 27%. That's more than any other group at age 63, including widows and women who may never have married,” said Roberts.
And divorce isn’t cheap. Roberts said the average divorce in the U.S. costs about $16,000, with $13,000 of that average going to the attorney.
“A litigated divorce is more expensive, almost $20,000 on average, with attorney fees closer to $16,000,” she said. “It also takes significantly longer.” It's 11 months for non-litigated divorces and 18 months for litigated divorces.
However, Roberts notes that these are national averages. Attorney fees in some parts of the country may be significantly lower than others.
How Common Is Divorce?
One issue that analysts like Roberts encounter when researching divorce is the accuracy of how the divorce rate is calculated. In the past, the divorce rate was calculated by taking the number of divorces in any given year and comparing it to the number of marriages in a given year. That results in a crude figure that has become less relevant as the rate of marriages has declined.
Another method was to look across the entire population to determine what percentage of adults had been divorced at any point in their lives, which resulted in a measurement of 22%, said Roberts, who added that is inaccurate because someone divorced multiple times would only be counted once. Similarly, a measurement looking at the number of divorces per 10,000 marriages is also inaccurate for the same reason.
Today, a more “sophisticated” estimation of the likelihood of divorce comes from a “cohort measured rate” that is calculated by looking at a particular cohort of people related to general life tables, said Roberts. Based on that, there’s a 32% chance that a marriage results in divorce.