How Women Can Prepare for Retirement

When our parents retired, living to 75 amounted to a nice long life, and Social Security was often supplemented by a pension. The Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates that today’s average 65-year-old woman will live to age 86½. Given these projections, it appears that a retirement of 20 years or longer might be in your future.1 Are you prepared for a 20-year retirement? How about a 30-year or even 40-year retirement? Don’t laugh; it could happen. The Society of Actuaries predicts that an average healthy woman that reaches age 65 has a 44% chance of living past 90, and a 22% chance of living to be older than 95.2 Start with good questions. How can you draw retirement income from what you’ve saved? How might you create other income streams to complement Social Security? And what are some ways you can protect your retirement savings and other financial assets? Enlist a financial professional. The right person can give you some good ideas, especially one who understands the challenges women face in saving for retirement. These may include income inequality or time out of the workforce due to childcare or eldercare. It could also mean helping you maintain financial equilibrium in

December 2, 2022 No Comments

Setting up a Child IRA

It’s normal for parents to worry about their kids. Although young children’s retirement isn’t an immediate concern, smart parents can help their kids get a head start on saving for retirement by setting up a Child IRA. Here’s why it’s a good idea. There’s no lower age limit when it comes to starting an IRA. A Child IRA is a custodial IRA that can be funded with pre- or post-tax money; it functions the same as a regular IRA except that there is a custodian overseeing the account. A Child IRA can yield unbelievable results. If you contribute roughly $3 a day to a Child IRA from the moment a baby is born, that’s about $20 a week, $80 a month or $1,000 a year. If you do that every year until the child reaches the age of 19 and then stop contributing, assuming an 8% return per year, the child will have more than $2 million at the age of 70. Is there a catch? Well, yes. While nothing prohibits a child from establishing a Child IRA, a child needs a paycheck to offset an IRA contribution. IRA rules say that to contribute to an Individual Retirement Account—at any age—you

June 28, 2019 No Comments