Baby Boomer Women Need Advice

What You Need to Know

The youngest boomer women are 59.
About 40% of Americans with more than $600,000 in assets are women.
In 2019, more than 11 million U.S. women were widows.

Baby boomer women are part of an American Silver Tsunami.

They were about half of the 76 million babies born from 1946 through 1964, and they now range in age from 59 to 77.

Many women have inherited, or will inherit, assets from their parents, their husbands and even their in-laws.

Thanks to work, investments and inheritance, 45% of American millionaires are women, and 48% of estates worth more than $5 million are controlled by women.

Many baby boomer women with assets need advice about insurance, retirement planning, income planning, long-term care planning and other financial matters. Addressing the weaknesses in boomer women’s financial planning can help advisors capture lost income, eliminate downturns and dominate their local markets.

Topics to Address

So, what should be on the agenda when you talk to boomer women?

1. Divorce: In the 2018 Worthy study “Building a Financial Fresh Start,” about 22% of the women surveyed were 55 or older; most of the older survey participants were already divorced.

Three nasty surprises divorced women reported encountering were:

Hidden marital debt.
Child support or alimony payments that were lower, or shorter-lasting, than expected.
The high cost of health insurance.

2. Widowhood: In 2019 there were 3.47 million widowed men and 11.41 widowed women.

The total number of widows and widowers has been increasing by 1 million per year, and the COVID-19 pandemic may have accelerated the rate of growth.

The household income for a wife typically falls 37% after a husband dies. That’s far more than the 22% income drop that husbands experience when their wives die, according to government figures.

The death of a spouse also tends to lead to a bigger decrease in assets for widows than for widowers.