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Markets haven’t gotten off to the start this year that investors were hoping as headline risk is running high in the U.S., but it appears female investors are seeing the forest through the trees as they feel optimistic about their 2025 financial outlooks.
Increasingly financially empowered, women have plenty of financial goals they want to achieve this year, but they’re not solely focused on the near-term. In fact, many are prioritizing bolstering retirement savings this year. That’s an actionable item for advisors because it could imply that more women will seek out professional advice – something they’re already more likely than men to do.
That focus on retirement planning is also important for the obvious reason that, on average, women live longer than men and because women are expected to inherit trillions of dollars of wealth via the great wealth transfer. Those points confirm that advisors need to ready with strategies tailored to women and their retirement.
Insight Into Women’s Retirement Objectives
Fidelity’s 2025 Financial Resolutions Study indicates women are considering unique approaches to retirement. In other words, gone are the days when a women goes from working one day to fully exiting the workforce.
“50% of women who retired in 2024 took a phased approach to retirement by working part-time, taking on less responsibility, or transitioning to more flexible work, compared to only 19% of women 20 years ago. Similar to men, this signals a shift of more women easing into their retirement years,” according to Fidelity.
That’s a prudent approach and one that can benefit female clients in terms of adding more capital to retirement accounts and ensuring some money is set aside for long-term care expenses – objectives that can be attained with the help of advisors.
Women extending their time in the workforce, even it’s in hybrid or part-time fashion, means advisors can be helpful on other fronts. For example, the tax code stipulates that as long as someone is working, they can make contributions to an IRA. Some clients, regardless of sex, may not know that and it could prove to be particularly valuable information to female clients.
“Among women retirees, nearly half are currently working, have worked, or are thinking about working in retirement. Women are also significantly more likely than men to transition to retirement by working reduced hours or days,” adds Fidelity.
Advisors, Focus on Healthcare, Too
In addition to being ready with female-specific retirement strategies, another point of emphasis for advisors should be healthcare and women can best tackle related expenses. That’s important because as Fidelity notes, the women who feel worse about their finances today than they did five years largely feel that way due to incurring expensive, unexpected healthcare costs.
As advisors know, healthcare costs are rising and there’s little to indicate that trend will improve so it behooves advisors to be ready to address the valid healthcare spending concerns of female clients.
“Women can expect to spend an average of $175,000 on health care costs and medical expenses throughout retirement, which is more than 10% higher than what men can expect to pay and up nearly 17% since 2019,” concludes Fidelity.