Take Control Of Your Finances #OwnMyFuture

This is a sponsored post for SheSpeaks/Prudential. #OwnMyFuture

More and more women are in the workforce. Prudential has been researching the financial challenges women face for several years, and their  Financial Experience study tracks women’s outlook towards financial planning.

Here are some facts about women in the workplace:

• On average women have 30% lower retirement balances than men.¹
• 44% of women have no life insurance. Even among the ones that do own life insurance, most are underinsured²

As a mom, there are many years that I was not in the workforce. So I wasn’t contributing to a retirement fund nor did I have life insurance. Now that I look back, those are important things we should be inventing in to prepare for our futures. We may take care of the day-to-day budgeting, but we leave out some of the important pieces of long-term financial planning such as insurance and saving for retirement.

Here are key insights challenging women’s financial security:

Now that my kids are in school, I am in the workforce again. I have the privilege of working for myself. So it makes me sad to see that other women in the workforce are not receiving equal benefits for the same jobs. There is a gap when it comes to the pay men receive vs women. The average woman working full-time earns 79% of the income earned by her male counterpart.³

This gap not only affects our current financial situation, but it impacts women’s 401K balances over their lifetime and social security payments. Women’s social security benefits are 27% lower than that of their male counterparts.SOURCE⁴

Another issue women face is we don’t invest to the same degree as men .⁵ And when we do invest, we are investing in lower risk, lower return options. We have less money available to us when we retire and we are living 5-6 years longer then meant.⁶ Women are more likely to be single later in life. Marriage patterns have changed over the last few decades; divorce has become more common, and more women are choosing to remain single.⁷

Women also spend about 28 hours per week on household chores – 65 percent more than the average for men.⁸ That is uncompensated work and it does not figure into women’s financial planning.

My parents got divorced when I was 16. My mom spent all those years in the home raising kids and taking care of all the household needs. Once she entered the workforce she had to start at the beginning of the pay scale and only had 1 salary to live on. All those years she was not contributing to any personal retirement or social security accounts. Besides working outside the home she still had to take care of 4 kids and a house. I wish she could retire and spend more time relaxing.

My mom still works full time. I wish she had been able to invest in her future when she was younger so she could relax more now and could spend more time traveling and visiting her grandkids.

Prudential has created a tool called the “Value of all you do” that lets you very quickly quantify the value of all the household chores you do on a daily basis.

The point of all of this is that we believe that women should AND can take control of their finances. Men work hard too and they get paid. The goal is to help raise awareness and start a dialogue so women can be better prepared for the future.

Where are you in your financial journey? I just turned 40. I have a job I love. I do feel like I am compensated well. We just built our dream home.  I have life insurance. But where I lack is investing in my future. I don’t set aside enough money for retirement. I now realize it something that is important. I want to be able to live comfortably and actually retire.

Click here to learn more and to find a Prudential advisor so you can own your future!

Sources:
^{1. Source: Prudential Retirement analysis reflecting defined contribution plan balances of Prudential record-kept plans as of December 31, 2015↩}

^{2. Source: LIMRA study, Life Insurance Ownership in Focus, U.S. Person-Level Trends: 2016↩}

^{3. Source: Source:  Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables Table P-40: Women’s Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s Earnings by Race and Hispanic Origin, 2016 ↩}

^{4. Source: Social Security Administration, Fast Facts and Figures About Social Security, 2016↩}

^{5. Source: http://fortune.com/2016/05/11/sallie-krawcheck-ellevest-launch↩}

^{6. Source: Prudential Retirement analysis; National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2015: With Special Feature on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Hyattsville, MD. 2016 ↩}

^{7.Source: Cruz, Julisa, “Marriage: More Than a Century of Change” (FP13-13), National Center for Family & Marriage, 2013,) ↩}

^{8. Source: Source: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, October 2016, http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=54757 ↩}