The Modern Family 80/20 Rule

Your assumption may be that these unmarried mothers won't be affluent enough to be worth your while, but look again. In many cases, women are choosing to be single mothers rather than marry men who won't pull their weight around the home, with the kids or as breadwinners. Women tend to view the purpose of accumulating wealth as building a safety net for themselves and their loved ones, and that's where you come in. You can help them build that net through emergency savings, insurance and retirement planning.

Women tend to save more than men, and since they generally enter the workplace later, they are often behind in their retirement planning to the tune of over $67,000 on average. They need you.

In 2013, nearly a quarter of all married couples included one partner who had been married at least once before.

A recent client said it this way: "Beware the heirs." His point was not that the heirs had ill intent, but that there may be more lurking in the background than an advisor realizes. In exploratory conversations with clients, advisors tend to focus on the person in front of them and his or her current financial state, instead of delving deeper by asking if there are other children from previous marriages or estranged family members who may show up with a claim to whatever affluence has been built. With so many second and third marriages, there may be more people than even the client realizes who need to be considered "in the picture."

To conclude, here's a fun fact: What year had the most teenage births since the data has been kept? You're probably thinking like I did: the years of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, somewhere in the 1960s. Wrong. It was 1957, when there were 96.3 births per 1,000 women ages 15-19. (In 2013, the last year the data was gathered, there were 26.6 per 1,000 for women the same age.) Incidentally, most of these teenage mothers in 1957 were married.