Brisbane mother Katherine McConnell.

“I’m still renting, I still haven’t bought a house because I’m trying to get a deposit together,” the 54-year-old Brisbane mother said.

Ms McConnell is one of nearly 1.5 million Australians between 25 and 64 who are currently separated or divorced. While the rate at which Australians are getting married and getting divorced has dropped during the past 20 years, 97,000 Australians are still divorcing each year.

According to the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling, more than one in three marriages are now likely to end in divorce.

Divorce and family breakdowns cost Australia $14 billion in 2014, an increase of $2 billion since 2012.

In a new report released today, ‘For Richer, For Poorer: Divorce in Australia’, NATSEM and AMP found it takes five years for divorced couples to recover their financial situation. Messy breakups not only destroy savings but affect home ownership, superannuation savings and education outcomes for children.

Ms McConnell split from her de facto partner in 1999 when their son was two years old. It took seven years of family court to gain full custody, and another seven years for her to “feel normal”.

But the financial shock of the breakup, and her decision to put her son through private education to give him the best shot in life, has left her without any accumulated assets to show for her working life.

“I didn’t recover for years,” she said. “I spent years at family court just in custody. We had no equity so I had to borrow. I was taking out personal loans to pay the lawyers.

“I had a fulltime job, then I had to get a second job. We couldn’t go on holidays, I was worrying every second of the day trying to work out how I was going to pay legal fees, on top of rent, and childcare and nappies and food and all the rest of it.”

Ms McConnell said the separation had prevented her from going back to university. “He was the breadwinner,” she said. “He was earning a lot more money than me, and he did pay the lion’s share.”

According to the report, divorced parents aged between 45-64 have 25 per cent less assets than their married counterparts.

Super balances for divorced mothers are 68 per cent lower than married mothers, and divorced mothers have 37 per cent less super than a divorced father.

Divorced fathers aged between 45-64 have 60 per cent less superannuation than married fathers five years after a marriage breakdown, and more than 20 per cent of newly divorced mothers struggle to afford basic items including school uniforms.

The report also found home ownership remained out of reach for many divorced parents, with 40 per cent of divorced mothers and 32 per cent of divorced fathers still renting five years after a marriage breakdown.

Home ownership rates were 15 per cent lower overall for divorced couples.

AMP chief customer officer Paul Sainsbury said with Australians now tending to divorce later during their mid 40s and prime wealth-accumulating years, the long-term financial impacts could be considerable.

“The most important thing people can do is actually plan,” he said. “In reality a good financial plan would actually have emergency savings of between three and six months of people’s living expenses.

“The other thing is make sure you’re really clear on the choices you’d make in financial hardship, such that you know what you could stop in terms of discretionary spending and what you have to continue, and put that in place quickly.”

According to Professor Laurie Brown, NATSEM director and author of the report, divorce could also influence children’s education outcomes. “A family breakdown decreases a child’s chance of getting a university education by 6 per cent,” Professor Brown said.

Ms McConnell, whose son is now in second year university, said she “scraped every cent to get him there” by sending him to private school.

“It wasn’t an expensive private school but it was a good private school,” she said. “It was an all-boys school, and not having a father around, they were magnificent. That’s what made him the man he is today.

“[But] I’m lucky I only had one. I don’t know what it would be like to have multiple children and try to do this.”

Ms McConnell said if she could go back in time, she would have gone to university as soon as she left school, and insisted on separate bank accounts with her partner.

But her number one piece of advice? “Get a really good lawyer.”

frank.chung@news.com.au