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Eight Retirement Planning Mistakes Women Often Make – Part 2

On July 9, I posted five of eight of the planning mistakes we often see women make and promised we would be back with more. Here they are:

6. Thinking that you will only spend 70-80% of what you spent during your working years. This has always been a rough benchmark and is derived by taking pre-retirement spend and subtracting out savings for retirement and college expenses. New research, summarized in a Brief we wrote last year entitled: How Much Do Retirees Spend?, indicates that actual retirement spend may be lower than above rule-of-thumb suggests, especially for more affluent clients, even taking increased health-care expenses into account.

7. Not knowing how long your money is going to last. This is a complex question and both women and men find it difficult to figure this out. Yet in the absence of this information, we often find that women, in particular, respond by “freezing up” refusing to spend on things they actually can afford.

8. Overrelying on their spouse. Because women live longer and often marry older men, the odds are high they will be single for the some years of their lives. So we are always a little concerned when women lack a basic understanding of both their current and prospective financial situation from not knowing how much money they have, how it is invested, how to get at it in case of an emergency, and so forth.

Please see our July 9 post for the first five mistakes we outlined.

Leigh Bivings, Ph.D., CFP®, CDFA™
Leigh Bivings, Ph.D., CFP®, CDFA™
Leigh is CEO and Founder of Artemis Financial Advisors LLC. Leigh has a Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University and is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®) and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA®). She enjoys working with clients and strives to give them peace of mind and robust frameworks so that they can make more informed choices about spending and saving and make these choices with enhanced confidence.

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