Divorcing after 50? There's a special financial adviser for that

When Betsy Goldstein began divorce proceedings at age 53, she found herself confronting a complex web of tax forms, retirement accounts and housing deeds — financial matters she hadn't bothered with during more than two decades of marriage.

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As if that weren’t enough, it was 2020, the pandemic was in full force and the stakes were suddenly high.“I really needed hand-holding,” she recalls. A mediator suggested she hire a specialist - not just a financial adviser, but one trained to handle the dollars-and-cents details of divorce. That brought her to Mr Geoffrey Burroughs, a certified divorce financial analyst, or CDFA. Over Zoom, they worked through her expected expenses and built a post-divorce budgetary blueprint.

“He gave me homework - ‘Betsy, I want you to write down all of your expenses, current and what you anticipate your future expenses will be,’” said Ms Goldstein, who lives in Maryland and is an editorial director for a food blog. Five years later, she remains a client.

Mr Burroughs is part of a fast-expanding pocket of the financial advisory world catering to a cohort of individuals navigating divorce later in life - a trend that’s reshaping wealth planning in the US.

There are now around 3,500 certified divorce financial analysts in the United States. Many operate at the intersection of wealth management, retirement planning and family law, serving a demographic that is becoming central to the divorce economy: older Americans.