I'm 44, divorced with no pension - here's how I'm securing my financial future

I am 44, divorced and I do not have a pension or own my home. In fact, if I am honest, I have no real financial security and the more I have started to say this out loud, the more I have started to realise that I am not the only woman of my age in this situation.

This was not the life I thought I would be living. Ten years ago, I was married to a high earner. He took care of our finances and I took care of our three children. He paid into his own private pension and the future was mapped out, secure. That is, until it wasn’t. We separated almost exactly seven years ago, and our divorce was finalised four years ago.

To anyone watching, my marriage looked like a love story. But behind closed doors, I had made myself smaller for years to keep the peace. I said yes when I meant no, swallowed down my feelings with a whisper of “it’s ok, I don’t mind”. I didn’t even realise how much of myself I had lost until it was over.

Our marriage ended very suddenly and before I really even had time to realise what was happening, there were solicitors involved and we were battling it out in court. All I wanted was to buy him out of our house. All he wanted was for me to sell it and move out. And the only thing I had to bargain with was the pension pot that just a few moments ago I was being told would take care of us into old age. He was enraged at the idea that I was entitled to a share in what he now viewed to be entirely his. And as the months passed and the legal costs spiralled, I did what I had to do to draw things to a close – and gave up my share in his pension.

And so here we are: 44, no pension and no real plan.

I did manage to buy him out of our family home, only to have to sell it a short while later to try and save my business – a gutter cleaning business, which I started in 2017. But it was too much. The business went into liquidation at the end of 2024. Any money I had is gone and now I rent my home with my children, and have nothing but debt to my name. I am a full-time content creator now.

When I started posting about my post-divorce financial nightmare, my messages were flooded with other women in very similar situations. So many of us have given up careers to have children, and with it, any financial security of our own.

Nearly two-thirds of 60-64-year-old women have absolutely no private pension wealth and even for those who do manage to accumulate one, the average private pension of a woman is between £81,000 and £88,000, while for a man it is around £155,000.

This is a ticking time bomb that no one seems to be talking about.

We grew up watching traditional roles being modelled for us; dads with careers, mums mostly at home. We were told we could do both – but the world has changed since we were sold that dream. The economy got rocky, costs went up, but salaries didn’t, especially for women. Many have discovered it actually isn’t possible to have a career and kids without killing ourselves trying. And while women of our parents’ generation have pensions and paid-off houses, we’re wondering when we’ll ever be able to stop working – especially if we’re also suffering from the ‘single supplement’.

42 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce, meaning many thousands of women are facing the future with no access to a pension pot that was meant to be shared. Here we are in our 40s and 50s, looking around, wondering what happened. Feeling too old to start over but too young to just carry on as we are.

Perhaps we should feel desperate, but I actually feel full of hope. Because somewhere along the way, something shifted. I stopped waiting for permission. The chapter where worrying about what people might think is out, and giving things a go is very much in.

Ten years ago, I’d never have dreamt of sharing my life online – I would have been too worried about what people might think. I never would have had my nose pierced, dyed my hair blonde, and started posting on TikTok. But it turns out, we’re not too old to start over.

Each new thing I try seems to uncover a little bit more of me and reconnects me to the fearless teenage girl I once was. And I’ve missed her. Reclaiming my teenage self doesn’t mean going backwards. It means whispering in her ear that financial security doesn’t come with a husband, it comes with building something of your own. It means knowing that, despite what society would have us believe, we’re not too late and we’re not too old. It’s not a midlife crisis, it’s just the beginning.

And that’s why I am shouting about this. Because we shouldn’t feel ashamed of where we find ourselves or nervous about what is ahead. And as we see the old systems failing us, we are pivoting and rebuilding. Learning to create income and wealth in ways that our mothers and grandmothers could not even conceive of. We are taking risks and learning to create lives and ways of earning that work for us, not against us.

There has never been a better time for women to take control of our futures.