From
Your Perspective:
Financial self-defense for women
Investing for
retirement
Lining up retirement income is especially important for women. That’s because Social Security and pension payments are linked to the amount you earn during your working years. And since women, on average, work fewer years than men, and earn 20% to 40% less while they’re working, they can expect to have less from those sources when they retire.
Women also have a longer life span than men, so they’ll need retirement income over a longer period of time.
Even if you have a spouse or partner who is saving retirement dollars that will support you, you should master the basics of retirement investing. Married women should be involved in decisions about their husbands’ pension payouts and other financial arrangements, since they may be faced with managing and investing this money at some point. And divorced women should know about the rights they have to pension benefits and Social Security income, based on their former husbands’ earnings.
According to the Social Security Administration, the average monthly Social Security benefit for women at the end of 2003 was $798. The average for men was $1,039.
To estimate your Social Security benefits, you can use the Retirement Estimator on the Social Security Web site:
www.socialsecurity.gov/
estimator/
Because the Estimator draws on your actual Social Security earnings record, you don’t have to manually key in years of earning information to get your estimate.
