Too Many Women Leave Themselves Out of Their Own Retirement Plan: Here's How We Fix That
Women often find it hard to take center stage in their own retirement plan. Here's how to start making a plan that takes care of those you love, but also lets you build a life you love, too.
Many women find themselves managing a financial life that became theirs alone, often after divorce or a loss, at the end of a career they built. And it tends to arrive on top of everything else they're already carrying, because women are so often the ones taking care of everyone else first — the kids, the aging parent — which means their own retirement plan is the one that never gets made.
You can see the result on a desk. The stack of papers, statements, policies, beneficiary forms and the envelopes you've been meaning to open grows taller every month.
For many, the easiest response to that stack is to look away and hope it somehow resolves itself. It rarely does, and the longer important financial decisions sit untouched, the harder they can become to unwind.
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But there's a version of this that looks completely different: A Saturday morning, a cup of coffee and a single page laying out everything you'll accomplish this year in three or four clear steps.
Closing the distance between those two pictures comes down to several key things I've learned over 24 years as a wealth manager: Asking the right questions before focusing on investment returns, working through your finances as one connected system rather than a pile of separate decisions, and refusing to build a plan that takes care of everyone you love but leaves you out of it.
Why I see this differently
I didn't arrive at this work from a textbook. I married young, and we had two children. Then the marriage came apart, and I found myself raising my young kids largely on my own.
Suddenly, I wasn't just managing their day-to-day lives; I was carrying the responsibility for their financial future, too — college, first cars, opportunities and all that I wanted to make possible for them.
The lesson I took from it is one I'd offer any woman: A financial future can land on one person with no warning, and hoping it won't isn't a solid plan.
At 24, I was also diagnosed with cancer, and for a time, I needed people to care for me. That taught me something no spreadsheet could: Almost none of us is as prepared as we think for the moment we need care, emotionally or financially.
I haven't experienced widowhood, but I know loss and I know illness. Those experiences gave me a deep respect for the emotional and financial weight women can carry when life changes without warning.
I'm also one of the professional businesswomen I serve, which taught me one of the most common mistakes of all. You pour everything into your work, tell yourself you'll get to your personal finances later, and "later" keeps moving.
When a woman who has built a successful career thinks about stepping away from work, she's untangling two things at once: Her identity from the work that shaped so much of her life, and her financial future from everything she worked so hard to build.
Those experiences shaped how I work, and what follows is what they taught me.
Ask the questions that actually matter
When a woman sits down with me, she almost never opens with a question about her rate of return. She opens with the people she loves. Will my family be covered? Can I help my aging parent? Those are the questions that keep her up at night, and they tell me far more about what her plan needs to do than any performance number could.
There's another question women rarely say out loud, and it matters just as much: What do I want my life to look like now? Can I build a life I love, too?
You don't have to choose between these questions, but you do have to name them, because every one takes money, planning and foresight. I know, because I did it myself. My kids are 18 and 22 now, and both know they had their opportunities because their mother asked those questions about a decade ago and then made a plan to make it happen.
Use a framework to help guide your planning
Answering those questions takes more than good intentions; it takes a way to work through everything at once. Here's a framework you can apply to your own financial life. I call it SMART, and its five parts cover what a plan should include: How you spend, what you make, how you invest, what you leave behind and the strategy for tax efficiency.
Spend. Spending isn't one number. Over 30 or 40 years of retirement, some expenses are inflationary, some fixed, some one-time, some seasonal. It's about how much you spend and, just as importantly, when.
Make. It's not simply about how much you make today, but how much you make over your lifetime — and how thoughtfully you coordinate these income sources so they are there when you need them most.
Assets. Through market cycles, including 2008 and COVID, I learned the conviction I hold most firmly: It's not about timing the market; it's about time in the market.
Remaining assets. For your heirs, the question isn't what you leave behind but how you leave it to them. Without thoughtful planning, an inheritance can create unintended taxes and complexity for the people you love. This is where legacy, estate, trust and risk planning come together.
Taxes. The goal is to lower your lifetime tax bill, not just this year's. Wealth isn't about how much you make. It's about how much you keep.
Focus on the whole picture, not one component
I keep a Rubik's Cube on my desk because it mirrors how the SMART process works: Turn one face, and the others shift. Spending affects taxes, taxes affect what your heirs receive, and an income decision at 62 changes what's possible at 80.
A spreadsheet treats each as its own column, but your life doesn't work in columns. So don't optimize one variable at a time; sometimes the right move is to undo a step, because it sets up the two that follow.
And because every move depends on where you're headed, the only place to start is your ideal retirement lifestyle. Start there, name it specifically, and reverse-engineer the steps that help get you there.
Write yourself into the plan
This is where I see women shortchange themselves. When they name that ideal life, it's almost always built around other people: The grandchildren's education, the trip the whole family takes, the cushion that protects everyone if something goes wrong. Those are worthy goals. But notice what's missing. Her own line, the one that funds what she wants, is the first to get trimmed when the numbers feel tight, and often it was never written in at all.
I treat that line as non-negotiable, and I'd urge you to do the same in your own planning. When you map out the years ahead, give your own life a specific, funded place on the page: The second act you want to start, the part-time passion, the standing date with friends, the travel you keep deferring.
Put a number on it, the way you would your children's or grandchildren's tuition.
A plan that assumes you'll make do with whatever is left over isn't balanced; it's just the old habit of putting yourself last, written into a spreadsheet. The equation only solves when both sides, the people you love and the life you want, are actually on it.
What planning is really for
I often think about women a generation ahead of mine who spent their whole lives caring for everyone else and never once pictured what they wanted for themselves. They reach retirement and ask, almost in surprise, what now?
I want a different next chapter for the women I work with, and it's within reach for any woman willing to do the work: Ask the questions that are really about the people you love, run them through a process that treats your finances as one connected whole, and make sure your own life is written into the answer.
Do that, and the stack of papers and the dread that comes with it turns into a Saturday morning, a cup of coffee and one clear page. That is what it means to solve the equation: Not choosing between the people you love and the life you want, but building the one plan that carries both.
You can take care of everyone, leave behind something you're proud of, and still keep a life that's unmistakably your own. You just have to put yourself on the page.
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