Do couples save for retirement? Surprise 1/3 don't

An online survey conducted by Arielle O’Shea at NerdWallet, a personal finance website, found that many twosomes don’t take advantage of the benefits. 

A Harris Poll recently surveyed more than 1,800 Americans in a relationship — defined as married or living with a partner — for NerdWallet, and a third of respondents said neither they nor their partner is saving for retirement, according to the survey. Here are three of the most worrisome missteps:

When couples save, they often are doing it in the wrong accounts

Here’s the general order when it comes to where you should save for retirement: Contribute to your 401(k) or other employer-sponsored plan, at least to the point where you earn all possible matching contributions. Then turn to a traditional or Roth individual retirement account. If you max that out, you can add more money to the 401(k).

Unfortunately, many Americans in a relationship who are saving for retirement have somehow worked into that hierarchy a savings account, which showed up in the NerdWallet survey as the second most common home for retirement savings.

2. Couples are letting one partner shoulder the retirement responsibility

It’s not unusual to have an income gap in a relationship; the wage gap actually widens with marriage and expands more when children come into play. According to salary comparison site Payscale, married women without children make 21% less than married men without children. That gap widens to 31% when you compare married women with children to their male counterparts.

So it’s not surprising that in the NerdWallet survey, only 24% of Americans in a relationship said both they and their partner are saving for retirement, or that men in a relationship were more likely to report saving for retirement than women in a relationship (65% versus 46%).

Saving for retirement is a solo game until you’re married. After that, it should be a shared effort. That’s not because the non-saver could be left with nothing in a divorce — how retirement assets are split depends on your state, but they do get split — but because that person could be giving up tax advantages and employer-matching dollars.

Even if one spouse earns less, the couple should be planning retirement account choices together. If only one of you has access to an employer match, use your shared retirement savings to contribute enough to catch that match, which is free money and a guaranteed return on your investment. If you both have an employer match, you should each contribute enough to take advantage of it.

Couples are not putting a dollar sign on their dreams

It isn’t hard to talk about the fun parts of retirement, like how and where you’re going to spend it. I’m not saying these chats aren’t important — my husband should know that I’m out if he ever buys an RV — but how you’re going to pay for those dreams should also be part of the conversation.

The trouble is that, according to the NerdWallet report, almost a third of Americans in a relationship who are saving for retirement haven’t discussed how much they need to save. This isn’t a fun part, but it also isn’t hard: An effective retirement calculator can shoulder some of the work.

How much you save makes all the difference in retirement. It means you can live in a beach house instead of a sandcastle. It’s what gives you a choice about how you’ll spend retirement; without savings, you could spend it working, and that’s if you’re lucky. Nearly half of retirees left work earlier than planned, most commonly due to health issues, according to a recent survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

When you plan for your future, you can hope for the best while being prepared for the worst.

Research on Ageing

Some loss of memory is often considered an inevitable part of aging, but new research reveals how some people appear to escape that fate. A study by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators examines a remarkable group of older adults whose memory performance is equivalent to that of younger individuals and finds that certain key areas of their brains resemble those of young people. 

The study published in The Journal of Neuroscience is the first step in a research program aimed at understanding how some older adults retain youthful thinking abilities and the brain circuits that support those abilities. The program is led by Bradford Dickerson, MD, director of the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit in the MGH Department of Neurology and Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, MGH Department of Psychiatry, who are co-senior authors of the new study.

While most older adults experience a gradual decline in memory ability, some researchers have described older adults – sometimes called “super agers” – with unusually resilient memories. For the current study, the MGH team enrolled 40 adults ages 60 to 80 – 17 of whom performed as well as adults four to five decades younger on memory tests, and 23 with normal results for their age group – and 41 young adults ages 18 to 35.

"Previous research on super aging has compared people over age 85 to those who are middle aged. Our study is exciting because we focused on people around or just after typical retirement age - mostly in their 60s and 70s - and investigated those who could remember as well as people in their 20s."

Imaging studies revealed that these super agers had brains with youthful characteristics. While the cortex - the outermost sheet of brain cells that is critical for many thinking abilities - and other parts of the brain typically shrink with aging, in the brains of super-agers a number of those regions were comparable in size to those of young adults.

Critically, the researchers showed not only that super-agers had no shrinkage in these brain networks but also that the size of these regions was correlated with memory ability. One of the strongest correlations between brain size and memory was found in an area at the intersection of the salience and default mode networks. Previous research has shown that this region - the para-midcingulate cortex - is an important hub that allows different brain networks to communicate efficiently.

Understanding which factors protect against memory decline could lead to important advances in preventing and treating age-related memory loss and possibly even various forms of dementia.  We need to understand how some older adults are able to function very well into their seventh, eight, and ninth decades. This could provide important clues about how to prevent the decline in memory and thinking that accompanies ageing in most of us.

This blog was written from information received from David A. Kekich and the Maximum, Life Foundation www.MaxLife.org

The Gender Divide in Retirement

According to a British Study called the  2016 Readiness Report, women are still significantly behind men when it comes to being prepared for their retirement. The UK’s average readiness score is currently sitting at 51. However, while men have a readiness score of 54, women have an average readiness score of just 49. On first glance, it might not seem like the gap is as wide as you might expect. Here some information from the report: (for the full report go here Pdf file)

How ready are you for retirement?

Pensions have graced the cover of almost every newspaper in the UK in the past 12 months, and there has certainly been a significant amount of column inches dedicated to the topic. But, the problem remains. Lack of preparation for retirement in women certainly has roots in previous employment patterns and social norms, and women are still more likely to have career breaks than men to care for family. However, there is also a lack of pension awareness across both men and women and a need for change.

Traditionally, women have relied on a spouse to provide for their retirement, but in today’s age of independence and equality, there is a need for women to take responsibility for building up their own pension pot. 

People reaching State Pension Age after 5 April 2016, will build up a State Pension based on their own national insurance contribution record, and apart from some complex transitional arrangements, it won’t be possible to inherit a spouse’s pension. It is increasingly important that both government and industry make a concerted effort to further encourage women to plan for life after work. Currently, women on average tend to live 3.7 years longer than men and they will need to make sure they have an adequate retirement income to live on.

The Readiness report research shows that women typically aim to retire aged 64, which is problematic given that by 2020, the state pension age for women will have risen to 66, if they don’t have private pension savings to fill the gap.

My life today is

If we take responsibility for our life and say without doubt or equivocation, that "My life today is entirely the result of my prior decisions, focus, and understandings." then and only then can you move on to meet your goals, your dreams, and to make peace with the past. If you can do this, then I believe that you will be able to see, without doubt or equivocation, that it's only a matter of time before your every cup is overflowing.