Older Women and Challenges of Wealth
During her 35-year marriage, Jill DeVaney earned significantly less than her husband, a television executive, but always handled the family finances. So when the couple divorced in 2012, splitting assets worth “several million dollars,” she said, “I knew where the money was.”
Now a semiretired interior designer in Chicago, Ms. DeVaney, 63, has hired a financial advisory firm that specializes in female clients, bought a three-bedroom townhouse and a Porsche, and traveled frequently with her daughter, Britt, 25. “I think I’ve got 25 more good years,” she said with a laugh.
As a woman nearing retirement age with substantial assets, Ms. DeVaney has plenty of company. In part that trend is thanks to gains made in her generation, when barriers to higher education, prestigious professions and credit began to fall, and to demographic factors like older baby boomer women outliving their husbands.
Nearly one million women in 2007 had assets of at least $2 million, a number comparable to the 1.3 million men at that level, according to estimates in the Internal Revenue Service’s Winter 2012 Statistics of Income Bulletin, which does not have such figures from earlier periods. The women in this group tended to be older than the men; nearly 80 percent were 50 or older versus fewer than 70 percent of men.
To some degree, this lucky group shares the same concerns as wealthy older people of both sexes throughout history, including complex investment choices and the risk of financial swindles. But some of the challenges and circumstances represent uncharted territory.
“We don’t have a lot of women role models who are older than us,” said Caren R. Levine, 55, a financial planner in Philadelphia with MassMutual Financial Group.
The proportion of women 65 and older who were divorced tripled to 12 percent in 2008 from 4 percent in 1980, according to “The Gray Divorce Revolution,” a 2013 report by Susan L. Brown and I-Fen Lin, sociologists at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For younger wives who are raising children, divorce often leads to worse economic straits. But women like Ms. DeVaney — whose children are grown, who have substantial marital assets to split and who have stayed informed about those finances — may find consolation in being in sole control of six- and seven-figure settlements.
For boomer-age women who stay married, there could be a double inheritance: from their thrifty, Depression-raised parents and from their husbands.
Yet since women’s life expectancy is typically around five years more than men’s, according to United States census data, “by definition, their wealth has to last longer,” said Judy Slotkin, a New York metropolitan area market executive at U.S. Trust.
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