Married Women Need Their Own Financial Plan: Study

The CRR report uses data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a national representative survey of people over age 50, and focuses on the portion of their lives that women over 20 spent being married. It compares those percentages among several cohorts: the oldest, born between 1931 and 1941; war babies (1942-1947); early boomers (1948-1953); and mid boomers (1954-1959).

After making several adjustments to the data, dated 2014, the CRR study found that mid-boomer women, age 54 to 60, will have spent slightly more than half their lives married, compared with 73% for the oldest cohort, age 73 to 83. Those percentages remained the same when comparing the two groups, with some college education and with a high school degree or less.

Close to half the boomer women divorced, compared with 34% of oldest cohort, and more than 12% never married, compared with less than 4% of the oldest cohort. Also, mid boomer women married later, at age 24, compared with 21 for the oldest cohort.

The study also found that black women spent substantially less time married than white women. Black mid-boomer women spent 32% of their lives married compared with 59% for white women in the same age bracket. No specific explanations were given for the gap other than a footnote noting that the difference has "been documented elsewhere," with a reference to another study.

The CRR study concludes that women as a group are "going to spend less than half their adult years as part of a couple…. [which] "shows up across race and educational attainment," and "has significant implications for financial planning."

— Related on ThinkAdvisor:

• 10 alarming facts about women and retirement risks
• Why Women Make Great Investors 
• Many Retirement-Age Women Lack Financial Literacy: American College
• Divorce is destroying retirement
• Women failing to max out Social Security benefits in retirement