How Single Women Are Spending Their Time and Money in Retirement
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Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, March 27th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Retirement is an ongoing exercise of trying to avoid running out of money. For single women, there are other factors to consider in living out their later years.
A lot of them really made pretty significant changes at some point, either before or after their official retirement. Women moved across the country, and another woman just even opted to retire pretty early in life and traveled the world.
Reporter Ann Turgason and members of the personal finance team recently spoke to single women about how they're getting by in retirement.
Why focus on single women when studying retirement finances and time use?
She'll join us after the break.
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Single women face a unique set of challenges in retirement. Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Anne Tergesen joins me. Anne, why did you and reporter Veronica Dagger spotlight single women for this story?
We wanted to kind of shine a light on the challenges that single women in particular face in retirement. Single people face a challenge compared to couples because they have to live on one Social Security check in retirement instead of two.
How do wage gaps and caregiving interruptions shape single women's retirement savings?
And, you know, they have one pot of savings, but single women have other things that they have to contend with.
How is a single woman's path to retirement different from, say, a single man?
a lot of it stems back to the gender wage gap. So women earn less than men on average during their working years. Some data that I've seen indicates that women on average are paid about 80 cents for every dollar that men earn. And women are also much more likely to take time away from a career to take care of children or parents. And over time, women accrue less savings because of their time away and because they earn less, and that also contributes to lower Social Security checks.
Tell me about some of the women you spoke with for this story.
One of the people I spoke to is a woman in New Jersey. She was a high earner. She was a consultant and she had a very successful consulting career.
What happened to the New Jersey consultant after she left the workforce to care for her mother?
But then in her late 50s, her father died and her mother needed full-time help. So she had to drop everything and become a caregiver to help her mother find full-time live-in help. And in her three months away from the workforce, her billable hours fell. So she got laid off. And then she had to think about finding a new job. So she had that career interruption that I was talking about that's really prevalent for women. And then she also became a caregiver to her mother, working in tandem with a paid caregiver. And she handled all the bills. She handed all the finances. She handled all the medical appointments to help her mother.
And she lives in New Jersey, which is not an inexpensive place to live. How does she get by?
She had a nice amount of savings because of her career in consulting. She saved diligently. She hired a financial advisor when she was pretty early on in her career. She had a financial plan. She ended up saving about $600,000 by the time she was laid off. And she also had a $50,000 emergency account. After she was laid off, she used the emergency account to make ends meet. She ended up deciding to launch a new business that is very focused on caregiving. So first she went through her emergency account, and then she actually turned to her $600,000 retirement savings nest egg, started taking about $3,000 a month from that.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:59
2
Why focus on single women when studying retirement finances and time use?
0:59–2:17
3
How do wage gaps and caregiving interruptions shape single women's retirement savings?
2:17–3:16
4
What happened to the New Jersey consultant after she left the workforce to care for her mother?
3:16–5:40
5
How did one woman use emergency savings and a nest egg to launch a caregiving business?
5:40–10:12
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from WSJ Your Money Briefing
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