Four tips for single women who are nearing retirement: get educated, save early and often, push out your retirement and max out your Social Security benefits. This episode is for single women who need advice on how to thrive in retirement. If you are divorced or widowed, find out how to properly claim your ex-spouse’s or deceased spouse’s Social Security benefits. Allison Alley (Pure Financial Advisor & CFP®) joins the show to discuss some financial challenges single women might encounter in retirement, then gives tips for putting together a financial plan and finding the right advisor.
1:14 “Unfortunately a lot of men are passing away before their spouses, because men die before women, and also women tend to marry older men”
3:54 “If you are widowed, there are strategies you want to know about. If you are divorced, there are strategies you want to know about. If you’re single and never married, we’ll get into that a little bit too”
7:08 “This is the power of compound interest; the earlier you start and the more money you can sock away, the better off everyone’s going to be”
8:27 “Planning is so key because the unexpected may happen and you want to make sure you’re prepared for that”
9:22 “Did you know that the average household turns over more than 75% of its stock portfolio every year?” (Source: Journal of Finance)
10:16 “If you’ve been married at least ten years and you’re a certain age, you can actually base your benefits on your ex-spouse’s benefits”
11:43 “A lot of times women, more so than men, will find themselves living alone in their later years of retirement. Living alone and for a longer period of time can be very expensive and unfortunately many women just aren’t prepared for that”
12:51 “We tend to see women willing to jeopardize their own retirement in order to help family, particularly their adult children”
13:41 “Find a fee-only financial advisor that you’re comfortable with and that you trust, and then if you are recently widowed, go slowly and don’t make any big decisions in the first couple of months”
15:51 “As long as you were married to the spouse for at least ten years (and you’re not currently married & at least 62 years old), you can still claim on the higher benefit of the spouse…it’s not going to take the money away from the ex-spouse”
18:00 “If you’re married there are 527 different combinations to claim your Social Security benefit. If your spouse were to pass or you get divorced, then there’s so much more convoluted type of strategy that you’ll want to take a look at”
24:51 “Chloe from Escondido asks, ‘is the money in my IRA protected from my creditors if my children inherit it?’”
