Taxes Work Personal Life Issues

In our last post we were talking about some of our buddies who have to work long into their retirement years because of their poor finances associated with being married more than once. We decided in this post to look at what the extra expenses are associated with the 2nd or even 3rd marriage and why this could have an impact on your retirement plans. You may have to work a few more years to make up for the extra expenses that you have while dealing with divorce and getting remarried.

Additional Expenses Associated with Divorce and Remarriage

Here is our list. Do you have any to add?

• Legal fees associated with your divorce settlement
• Legal fees associated with a pre-nup on your 2nd marriage
• 2nd marriage getting married expenses
• Support costs especially if your spouse was not working or made less
• Support costs for the kids
• Paying for two lodgings instead of one
• Paying for travel costs for the kids to visit
• Retirement pension cut by 50%

There are probably others , but these are the big ones that come to mine. Note that the legal fees are within your control and can be reasonable or they can be huge if  you decide to contest the settlement.

What happens if you Get Remarried

It gets very complicated to say the least. Now you have sharing arrangements with a variety of kids and families, more gifts to buy at Christmas and birthdays and more expense associated with the family in general.

If you happen to marry a working spouse, some of the extra expense mention above in our last section can be reduced somewhat. You can at least share the cost of some of the bills such as lodging expense and travel costs. Even retirement can be better if two people are supporting retirement costs. You still have all of the legal fee costs which is just money that is gone and can never be recovered or replaced.

Consider Carefully When you Remarry

Although everyone wants to be in love and not worry about finances, the reality is that we must if we are to continue to live comfortably. Be very careful when you remarry and protect yourself as well by having a pre-nup for both parties which spells our how your expenses will be handled and how your assets will be handled especially if there is a breakup in the future.

Our friends who are married for the 2nd or 3rd time just have to face the music and know that they are going to have to work for a while longer to make up all of these extra costs that they have.

Retirement and 2nd Marriages

I was having coffee with a buddy the other day and we were discussing a lot of things that are going on around us, when we touched on an observation that we both have made over the years. We are both early retired, we both have long term marriages and we have only been married once.

We were discussing how a number of friends of ours are on their 2nd or even their 3rd marriages and still working. They are around the same age as us and will be working for some time. One of the reasons that they are still working is the fact that they had to pay for expensive divorces. Even if there was no contest of the estates, and the settlement was 50-50, there still is a huge impact on the savings and retirement pensions of these people.

They simply do not have the ready cash and savings that many other people have who have not separated.

Getting Remarried

Getting remarried is not all bad. If you marry someone who has a job and can support herself or himself, you now have two incomes to split the bills with and pay for the extra things that we all like to have. The net though is really what you spend on legal fees fighting the settlement and also support costs that are incremental to what you would have normally spent supporting your estranged spouse or children.

Let’s face it , when you spend money on support for the family when you are married, it is spent usually a lot more efficiently than when you are separated. Sometimes when there is animosity between the parties, people tend to be a little more free spending their ex-spouses money than they normally would.

In our next post we will look at some of the areas that cost more and why our buddies really need to continue working to support themselves into retirement as well as their estranged families.

We would like to hear your comments and let us know if you agree or disagree with our comments.