Retirement Planning for Women

Hello and welcome once again to Mr. Stillman's Opus.

John Stillman here alongside a very special guest today, Jeanette Bejalia, founder of Woman's Worth, co-founder of Petros Estate and Retirement Planning in Jacksonville, Florida, the author of Retirement Done Right and also Wise Up Women. Jeanette, what's happening? How are you? I'm doing great. Super to be with you.

Yeah, good to talk with you. We've known each other for, I don't know, six or seven years now and it's been fun to sort of watch your evolution as an advisor. Really, one of the premier, if not the premier advisor in the country for helping, specifically women, deal with financial and retirement planning. You know, there are other women out there who are financial advisors but you've really taken on that role and I think, what, pretty much two-thirds of the business that you do is specifically helping women.

Would that be accurate? Oh yes, at least two-thirds, absolutely, because we have a real passion at Woman's Worth to really serve women the right way and speak the language of women. So that being said, obviously financial planning is different for women and men. What are some of the challenges that are specific to women when it comes to getting their retirement mapped out? The retirement challenges for women and every publication is coming out with a woman's retirement risk and it stems from the reasons women plunge into financial crisis in older years.

One is premature widowhood. The average age of widowhood in America is 59 and so with that comes lost income and you thought you were going to be married the rest of your life and all of a sudden you find yourself widowed earlier than when you can claim Social Security benefits. The other reason is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population is, happens to be the 60 plus generation so when you see the divorce, later life divorce, they're calling it gray divorce, you see women are more impacted because typically women have stepped out of the workforce on average 19 years in caregiving roles and they are non-paid caregiving roles. I see daily a professional woman that stepped out of the workforce, was a CPA, was an attorney, decided they wanted to raise their children and wanted her to be a stay at home mom and all of a sudden in early 50s she finds herself divorced.

That has significant financial impacts. And then the third reason is longevity. Women are living longer and longer and longer. The fastest growing segment of the U.S. population is a 90 plus so when you add those three culprits, women are greater risk in retirement. I can't tell you how many divorced women clients I have that have gotten divorced in their 50s or 60s.

It's amazing how often that happens. Let's go back to the very first thing you said, widowhood. You said the average age for widowhood is 59 years old which sounds really young. Is that because there are that many women who are that many years younger than their husbands? Is that part of that?

Actually not. It's not what I see in my practice and we serve women. We have a company that specializes with women so basically what we're seeing, remember I said average is 59 John which means many of them get widowed much younger than and many much older, the average being 59. So when I look to see the young women that I serve that are widowed in their late 20s, early 30s, it's because of car accidents and motorcycle accidents.

We've been with this huge trend where we're living on the edge and young people don't think that they need to protect themselves for life insurance. Well and you mentioned the longevity issue. So often I'll have a couple sitting in my office and you know maybe the husband is three or four years older and you know when we're looking at their retirement plan, we're planning statistically for the wife to outlive him by eight years or so because women live longer and she's younger. So how do you address those longevity issues when you're putting a plan together? The way I do it is I do lifestyle scenario planning and I always give them plans for lost income because I want to know today even if there's a 5, 6, 8 year age difference. It's important for us to recognize that women need to get their heads out of the sand and protect themselves because I know from a personal experience my mom was widowed at 62 and she remained a widow. I mean she lived 33 years of her life as a widow with one single income and my dad died without life insurance and my dad died leaving her with only a $542 Social Security check and a mortgage.

So as we see the longevity, my mother lived to 93, the life care costs associated with women living beyond 80 are insurmountable in a day of skyrocketing health care costs, long term care costs and you have to plan for these issues because longevity is redefining retirement planning for women. Jeanette, how do women process financial decisions differently than men? Because I know in a lot of cases it really is a completely different conversation and a completely different decision making process. You're absolutely right John and I respect you for providing some information to your clients and prospective clients about the differences. There is actually no area where gender differences are more prevalent than in the area of money and finances and the way women process information, we as women are relationship based.

You know what? We care about safety, security, protection. We care about not running out of money.

We care about not being a burden on our children or our loved ones. That's who we are as women and that has to be taken into consideration in the planning models. So when it comes to the financial language of women, it doesn't have much to do with rates of return and risk tolerance and all that.

It's about how do I make sure I don't run out of money before I run out of life and I don't end up being a burden on my children. While for a lot of the men it is more of a mathematical conversation, is that what I'm hearing you say? It is mathematical. They like spreadsheets. They like rates of returns.

They want to sit there and they live on the edge. They want to try to drive the market up and I serve both men and women in my firms. I serve individuals. I serve couples.

I serve partners and I look at the differences. I have never, never sat across the table with a woman that says I'm willing to take risk for the promise of a higher return. What they say to me is I'm willing to take managed risk if you can help me understand how it'll protect my financial future. So for women it's an education based approach to planning and it's not a financial approach.

It's not about spreadsheets and rates of return. It's about educate me as to why I need these financial solutions and what they will do for me at a goal level. Jeanette, what would you say to women who maybe aren't very involved in the financial conversations in their household because it seems like in most couples there's one or the other who's going to be more dominant when it comes to the retirement planning and it's not always the man but I'd say majority of the time it is. So what would be your message to women who, you know, even if they're not going to be the primary decision maker or the primary person watching the money, how would you encourage them to be involved in the process? Oh my message, that's an excellent question and I'm glad you asked me that because I do so much education to women to really help them understand how important it is to sit at the table and to be one of the drivers. John, most women make about over 90 percent of the day-to-day operational financial decisions, when to buy carpeting and what to spend on, you know, groceries and the other.

So they're making all those day-to-day operational decisions. But when it comes to the strategic decisions, the money management, the investments, I am encouraging women to get your head out of the sand and sit at the table with your husband and your advisors and make sure that that advisor answers your questions directly because it is your plan too. It's not your husband's investment plan because all your investments are a means to your lifestyle. So we need to make sure that you work with someone who can speak your financial language and that's quite a bit different.

And it's important for you to get actively involved. And you know what, if someone's trying to help you make a decision about buying this versus buying that, investing this way versus this way, always ask one basic question. How does that bring my personal goals, my life goals, how does it bring it value? Because you could be sitting on a host of homeless investments that are being sold to you that don't have a goal that supports you, whether you're single, whether you're divorced, whether you're married, you need to have a goal-oriented life plan.

Force your advisors to talk to you about life planning, not investment management. Having said all of that, I've experienced couples who only the husband will come in for a conversation. And it's maybe, you know, they met with a financial advisor 10 years ago and the wife didn't like him, felt turned off and hasn't been engaged in the process ever since. And so like the husband is very much pushing for the wife to get involved, but she just won't. In those situations, what are the things that you would tell husbands to do to be sure that their plan is structured well for their wife, you know, assuming that the wife outlives them? John, that's why I wrote my first book, Why's Up Women? It's a book that talks about the health-wealth connection because typically if women understood they were going to outlive their husbands on average 8 to 14 years, we're seeing data that suggests 14 years now. And if there is an age difference, and more recent statistics are showing that 80% of women die single.

So you're going to have one income taking you through your elder life stages. It's important for us to work with women and help them, educate them about proper life choices. And again, many, I run a woman's worth radio program every week.

I have an hour radio program. And it's pretty interesting because I have a lot of men calling in saying I want to get some help. And I make my book available to the men because the men do want their wives to get involved. But women are not going to get involved because we don't want to look stupid. And we don't even have the foundation to ask the right questions because the financial language that's spoken by the industry is not our financial language. And so we don't want to look stupid because we as young girls, I'm a baby boomer.

We weren't socialized to take charge of the financial matters, the strategic financial matters. So we have to start with the basics and educate women. And a good starting point is my book. And again, that is Wise Up Women. What's the subtitle there, Jeanette? It's Wise Up Women, your guide to total fiscal and physical well-being, because it's about the health-wealth connection with women. When I can speak to women about how important it is for you to get involved in financial decision-making because of skyrocketing healthcare costs, because 75% of nursing home residents are women, believe me, they want to get involved.

Absolutely. And that's probably a whole different topic for another day is discussing the long-term care issues. Jeanette, always good talking with you. Thanks for making some time. It was great to be with you, Jon. That's Jeanette Bajalia, founder of Woman's Worth, the author of Wise Up Women, also co-founder of Petros Estate and Retirement Planning in Jacksonville, Florida. We'll talk with you again very soon, right here on Mr. Stillman's Opus. Have a great day.