Women often lack glitter in their golden years

Why? Now 55, she's accumulated only about $15,000 in retirement savings.

"I've been playing grasshopper while the ants have been busy saving," she said. "Finally my consciousness is up, and I know I'll never be able to retire. What a noodlehead I was that I didn't even think about retirement security."

Hers is a concern for millions of American women whose hopes for the golden years are being tarnished by hard economic realities.

The odds for a comfortable retirement are not in women's favor. More women than men are outliving their savings. Women are twice as likely to die in poverty as men. And prospects are even worse if those women are divorced or a minority.

The reasons are clear: As a group, women work fewer years, earn less, save less, and then live longer than men. It's a potent recipe for financial insecurity.

"A lot of the women I see fear becoming bag ladies, whether they have money or not," said Sharon Lockhart, a financial planner in Johnson County, Mo.

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McCandlish earns about $40,000 a year as an admissions representative for Grantham University in Kansas City, Mo. She has a good credit rating, so she recently was able to get a loan to help pay some expenses. But now, her extra cash is going to pay interest.

"I'm a wonderful spender ... on what, I don't know," she said. "What does it say about me that I don't even know that?"

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McCandlish, who is working with a financial planner, finds herself in a predicament common among women who never took an interest in personal finance and now are approaching an uncertain retirement.

Hope for a leisurely retirement has faded for many men and women alike, but Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that the consequences are playing out in the workplace more forcefully among women.

Participation in the labor force by women 65 and older is increasing nearly twice as fast as that of older men, and the statistics bureau projects a 147 percent jump in the percentage of women 80 and older who will be working in 2016.

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Cloe Commans, 78, works full time and plans to keep at it as long as her health allows.

"I opted for the money side of retirement," said Commans, the manager of a condominium tower in Kansas City. "I want to leave my grandchildren something instead of draw down my portfolio."

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While some women are working late in life because they want to, others work because they have to.

Here's why:

_ Over their work lives, U.S. women on average work for pay 12 years less than men.

_ The median annual earnings of working women are about $10,000 less than men's earnings, partly because more women work part time and partly because there are more women in lower-paying jobs.

_ More than half of working women reported in a recent national survey that they can afford to save nothing for retirement.

_ A 65-year-old woman is likely to live about 20 more years, about three years longer than a man's life expectancy.

_ The median annual income for retired women is less than two-thirds that of retired men, partly because women have less income from pensions or retirement accounts.

Concern about personal finances in old age permeates the psyches of American women.

The Institute for Women's Policy Research this year analyzed an economic security survey commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation. The report concluded:

"Despite their educational achievement and their (perhaps temporary) financial connection to a husband, women's lives are pervaded with a sense that economic catastrophe may be just around the corner.

"And a disproportionately large segment of the female population has already experienced this kind of catastrophe and knows full well how it feels to put off health care, be unable to provide adequately for their children, or go hungry."

How did it come to this?

Social Security, one prop on the "three-legged stool" that supports older-age income, is a gender-neutral program.

Women, per se, are not discriminated against by the program, which on average pays qualified retirees about 40 percent of their pre-retirement earnings each month.

But most financial planners say retirement income needs to equal at least 70 percent of pre-retirement income to avoid a big decline in standard of living.

Cindy Hounsell, executive director of the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement, writes in "The Female Factor 2008" that "nearly half (46 percent) of all elderly women beneficiaries relied on Social Security for more than 90 percent of their income" in 2005.

Clearly, Social Security alone will not allow maintenance of a ...

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