Major Moves · Family Changes
Divorce Settlement & Buyout Calculator
How do we split assets fairly and reset financially?
How This Calculator Works
This calculator models the financial reset a divorce forces: what you walk away with, what your monthly cash flow looks like afterward, and how far the whole event sets back your retirement. It starts from the marital balance sheet — combined assets, combined debt, the home's value and remaining mortgage, and retirement accounts — and applies your expected split percentage to compute your share of the net estate. Legal fees come off the top of your side, because in practice they're paid from what you keep.
On the cash-flow side, it takes your own post-divorce income and adjusts it for alimony and child support, either of which can point in both directions — the sliders accept positive values for support you receive and negative values for support you pay. The result is a realistic "monthly income after obligations" figure, which is the number your post-divorce budget actually has to live on.
Finally, it projects your reduced asset base and your post-divorce savings capacity forward at your assumed return, and compares that trajectory to the one you were on before the split. That produces two of the most clarifying numbers in the tool: the retirement gap (how much smaller your projected retirement balance is because of the divorce) and the break-even age at which your rebuilt savings have recovered the legal fees. It does not attempt state-specific property division rules, tax treatment of support payments, or QDRO mechanics — it's a planning model for seeing the shape of your reset, not a legal document.
Worked Example
Say a couple has $800,000 in combined assets including a $550,000 home with $280,000 still on the mortgage, $120,000 of combined debt, and $400,000 of that asset total sitting in retirement accounts. At a 50/50 split with $25,000 of legal fees on your side, the calculator nets the debt against the assets, applies your split percentage, and subtracts the fees to show your starting net position — along with your share of the retirement assets, which matters separately because that money is age-restricted rather than spendable now.
If your post-divorce income is $7,500 a month and you pay $500 a month in child support, your income after obligations is $7,000 — and the projection shows how long rebuilding takes at your savings rate and assumed return. The "retirement gap versus no divorce" figure is often the sobering one: splitting assets in your 40s doesn't just halve a number today, it halves the base that two more decades of compounding would have worked on. Seeing that gap explicitly is what turns vague anxiety into a concrete rebuild plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I model a house buyout with this calculator?
Treat the home like the negotiation actually treats it: the spouse keeping the house effectively buys the other's share of the equity (home value minus mortgage balance). If you're keeping the home, your split of the other assets typically shrinks by the equity you're absorbing — you can reflect that by lowering your split percentage or reducing the non-home assets on your side. If you're being bought out, the buyout payment shows up as liquid assets on your side while the house and mortgage leave your balance sheet entirely.
How are retirement accounts split in a divorce?
Retirement assets accumulated during the marriage are generally divisible marital property, and employer plans are typically divided using a court order (commonly called a QDRO) that lets the transfer happen without early-withdrawal penalties when done correctly. The rules are state-specific and procedural mistakes are expensive, so this calculator only models your expected share of the retirement total — the mechanics of dividing a specific account belong with your attorney.
Is alimony taxable, and does the calculator account for that?
For divorce agreements executed in recent years under current federal rules, alimony is generally neither deductible by the payer nor taxable income to the recipient — a reversal of the older treatment that still applies to some pre-2019 agreements. The calculator works in whatever after-tax figures you give it, so enter support amounts as the cash that actually moves each month and confirm the tax treatment of your specific agreement with a professional.
How much does a divorce cost?
The range is enormous: an uncontested divorce with a settlement worked out between the parties can cost a small fraction of a litigated one, while contested cases involving custody or business valuations can consume six figures. That's exactly why legal fees are a slider in this calculator rather than an assumption — model your realistic scenario and a pessimistic one, and note how much the break-even age moves between them. Fees are one of the few divorce variables you can partially control through settlement posture.
Can I recover financially after a divorce at 40 or 50?
The projection usually shows that recovery is real but slower than intuition suggests, because you lose both assets and the compounding those assets would have generated. The levers that move the trajectory most are your savings rate and your years to retirement — which is why the same split hurts a 55-year-old more than a 40-year-old in the model. Running the calculator with a higher post-divorce savings rate shows exactly how much of the gap disciplined rebuilding can close.
The model behind this calculator
spec v1.2.0 · 250 open casesThis calculator runs a published model: its inputs, formulas, assumptions, and exclusions are documented in a versioned specification, and it is Concordance-tested — an independent second implementation, built from that spec alone, must agree with it on 250 open test cases before any change ships. The same model is callable by AI assistants and developers.