E56: The Financial Domain of Midlife

Kirtly: Welcome to the 7 Domains of Midlife, and we're about to talk about the financial domain. And with me is my co-host and international traveler, Katie Ward. Katie, welcome back to this side of the planet.

Katie: Thank you.

Kirtly: What were you up to in Rwanda? She just got back yesterday. So what were you up to in Rwanda?

Katie: I was leading a global learning trip with a group of nurses. So it was a project we started pre-pandemic. We were able to take one team in 2019, but this is our second trip and the first one post-pandemic. So this was a time to go back and renew relationships and see what the needs are.

It's grown. Their economy is growing faster than ours, and so much development is happening, but they have a really ambitious goal to increase their healthcare workforce by four times in the next four years, the 4x4 Project.

Kirtly: We're going to talk more about that, but in the financial domain, when we're thinking about midlife, we're often thinking about preparing for retirement. And for most of our times on the planet, there was no retirement.

Even until recently, the past 50 years or so, women moved from raising children to raising grandchildren. And they became important in their communities in the role of keeping the family and the community together. Often teaching without a teaching certificate, but teaching children. And in return, the families took care of them as they grew older. For women without children, they became very important aunties in their community.

So, Katie, getting back to Rwanda, do you have a sense of what women in Rwanda who are in midlife are dealing with in their financial future? Is that a silly question?

Katie: No. Actually, I asked a few people in anticipation of this conversation. So Rwanda's really an up-and-coming country, and they have some women who are living and working for the government or in bigger corporations in the cities, and they are developing a kind of pension and retirement program that continues to pay people.

But for the vast majority of people in the country who are still living a very traditional life, where the women farm, they are continuing to farm until the very end. So they are the backbone of that economy and they're in their fields, laboring by hand, and carrying all of their goods on their head and carrying it back and forth to market. And as you said, helping raise the kids and being the elders in the village.

Kirtly: And in many more traditional countries or cultures, women who can't do that kind of work anymore stay and take care of the children. If they can't do that work, they will stay and watch the kiddies while the moms are out doing that stuff. So it's a very integrated life for a whole life.

But we have this idea of work and then retirement, or work and then play. And it's pretty new, I think.

Katie: It is, and it's a new concept there. But they actually have a special handshake. So I would notice as people greeted me that I got an unusual handshake. So they'd shake my hand and then grab the arm with which they were shaking my hand. And I'd seen this and I thought, "Well, maybe it . . ." I finally asked, "What does this mean?" And they said, "Oh, that's a sign of respect to your elders." So then I knew I was a little bit older because I was getting the special handshake.

Kirtly: Well, in Asia, you become an auntie even if you're not. So when I would visit my brother in Malaysia, they would call me auntie even though I wasn't their auntie. But that was a sign that I, at that time of life, had a certain level of respect.

Well, getting back to contemporary U.S. life, most women work outside the home, and maybe not full-time, but they do. And they may realize, some will, that they'll always be working because they don't work in a job that has a retirement plan, or maybe they're thinking about planning for retirement. I certainly was.

At 45, I actually started my Alive at 55 plan. Clearly I love my work, but I wasn't sure I'd always loved my work. Staying up all night with blood on my shoes as an obstetrician, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do that forever, and I really wanted to be able to do what I wanted to do at 55.

And so it meant sitting down with my husband and a financial planner and kind of deciding to lead a small life, a small house, and that way we had options. But it took me thinking about it and it took someone to teach me about it.

How about you, Katie?

Katie: At midlife for me, I went through a divorce. Instead of feeling like I had the security of two people's income, I realized I was going to be the captain of my financial ship.

I mean, it had significant implications for me financially getting divorced. One of them was thinking about, "How do we split our assets?" and then really taking a good hard look at what that was going to mean for me in terms of my trajectory of work and retirement.

So when we were married, we had a much younger age at which we imagined we would retire and go lead this imaginary life. And when that changed, I had to say, "Oh, I'm responsible for this."

And in some ways I liked the freedom of being able to make my own decisions, my own investments. But that burden of "I am now responsible for my financial security and it's a finite pot of money" really changed how I managed money.

Kirtly: Did you look for help? Did you get some advice?

Katie: I mean, I meet with the financial advisor through my work kind of periodically. I had this one financial advisor whose approach was to say, "I want you to imagine the retirement you want, and then we'll work backward." And I said, "You don't know me that well, but I love the life I'm living right now, and I have a very hard time imagining retirement. I don't really want to think about it. Here's my little pile of money. Just rearrange it so it's earning whatever it's supposed to earn and I will live within my means when the time comes."

But I still don't like to think . . . I like what I'm doing right now so much that the idea of not doing this is hard to actually even imagine. I don't even want to. I sort of think about the money, but I am living the life I want right now, and I don't want to imagine not doing it.

Kirtly: Right. Well, for women, maybe they have a job and maybe their job has some kind of financial planning or some kind of retirement plan. Most jobs that have a fair number of employees have to have this. And there is usually someone . . . if they work with Fidelity, or they work in academics and nonprofits, they might work with TIAA and you could talk to someone there for free.

But being financially smart means you have to at least know where your money is. You had to find out where your money was, what was yours, where it was, and how far could it get spread out.

You can visit your Social Security. It's very hard getting into your Social Security website, your personal one. It takes dual identification and it takes a little computer savvy. If you do it on the phone, the people are wonderful, but you'll have to wait a half an hour. So it's a little tricky to find out what your Social Security is going to be.

But sometimes actually, starting at about 60, they start sending you out a piece of paper that says, "This is what it's going to be," so at least you know that.

So I think that if you're not sure what you have and you're not sure how to manage it, there are people, financial advisors, who often work with financial institutions, and some of them do it for free. Some of them do it for some money, but some of them do it for free.

And so if your retirement plan at work has investments in Fidelity or something, there are advisors at Fidelity who will do it for free. But you want to make sure that they are licensed financial advisors, and you can find out from them, and that they are fiduciary, meaning they have an obligation to put your best interests above their own. They're not allowed to collect commissions from any kind of savings or investments that you do if you're going to do that.

But if you don't have enough to even think about investments, you at least ought to know what your budget is. So it's time now to at least kind of figure out what's in your wallet. There's that advertiser. "What's in your wallet?"

And then there are women . . . imagine someone who's not in charge of the family finances. She's married, or she's partnered, and they really haven't ever thought about participating. They don't really know what their partner might have, and their partner might be screwing around with them. What did you call it? You call it financial infidelity.

Katie: Financial infidelity.

Kirtly: Yeah. That's when somebody is putting money in places that aren't to your benefit, and that's the worst possible kind of outcome. But that's the time when you do need to sit down with your partner and a third party to get your heads together and make sure you're on the same plan.

For many women, if they are not working or working part-time and they're counting on their partner as being the primary provider of resources in their later years, they better find out what they've got. And that takes an honest conversation, I think.

Katie: I see that a lot in my practice. And actually, I think that this kind of stress, financial stress, whether it's that you have a lot of debt and you're having a hard time paying all the bills, or lots of other things about finances, that really rolls over into people's physical lives. It's kind of a constant stress . . .

Kirtly: It is.

Katie: . . . on people, and it certainly rolls over into their bedroom lives.

So if there's tension about money . . . If people come in and they're asking about their sex life, I'm going to ask a lot of questions about their physical health, but also relationship health and what are the sources of stress in their marriage. And I think this comes up a lot.

Kirtly: Oh, it's number one. The number one stress in marriage is money. People just don't speak about money in the same language. And some, they don't always share what they've got.

That was my wake-up call, taking care of midlife women, was looking at what was happening in their lives and I thought, "Well, I think I better get my act in gear."

And in terms of getting your act in gear, for a single mom living paycheck to paycheck, imagine that particular patient. And you've got those patients who are midlife and they're working paycheck to paycheck. The first thing is you need an emergency savings account. They just have to try to put three to six months of savings away for an emergency if they should get sick or a family member gets sick and they have to go on FMLA. They don't pay you when you're on FMLA. You have to work on your savings. You've got to have some.

And then, for me, the part that always breaks my heart is women who are having really nothing in their savings account, but they're paying for their kids. I understand that, but they're paying for their kids' phone. These are kids who are 18 or 20. They're paying their kids' school loans. I admire that, but if you don't have your own savings account, you can borrow for your kids' school, but you can't borrow for your retirement.

So that saying "in the case of a loss of cabin pressure, put on your own mask first." In the case of a loss of cabin pressure, which there will be when you get older, you should be having your own mask on.

Something like 60% of women in their 50s and 60s are still paying off some of their kids' college loans. That's a lot.

Katie: I absolutely agree. I think I see a lot of parents who out of guilt or just a desire to help their kids with a leg up in life are making financial decisions, including borrowing against the equity in their house or borrowing against their own retirement, in order to give their children whether it's a phone or a college education.

I mean, maybe it's a great investment and your kids are going to take care of you when you're old, but I think it's a risky one.

And what I see a lot is that in spite of careful financial planning, the medical costs for people well into retirement really exceed what you anticipate.

So you can sit down with your financial advisor and I think you can come at this from a couple different ways. You can say, "How much will I have to live on if I'm 80 or 90 or 100?" Or you can do what my financial planner did and say, "Imagine what you want and let's make sure that you just keep working until you have as much as you need."

But no matter how you approach it, surprises happen. And it's often medical expenses for people that you get a ways into retirement and then you end up with a medical issue that you didn't anticipate. And the treatments, the care that you need exceed the money that . . . you run out of the money that you've saved.

Kirtly: Exactly. Naively, and I am naive because I work in medicine, but I don't really know what everything costs. Now that I have Medicare, Medicare does not pay for everything.

Katie: It does not.

Kirtly: There are lots of things that you just have to get money for. And if you were counting on your house being your retirement plan and then someone gets sick . . .

I think of couples where one of them is disabled, is aging, and has dementia, and Medicare does not pay for dementia care. They don't pay for activities of daily living. And so you can switch someone over to Medicaid, but you have to have used up all your resources to do that.

Katie: You have to spend absolutely everything.

Kirtly: And so you have to really, as a couple, get poor before someone . . .

Katie: Yes.

Kirtly: So this sounds very grim and I don't mean it to be grim, but it does help to be mindful about when you are thinking about your four children, and two of them are still at home and two of them you're paying for their car insurance and you're paying for their phone and you're paying for their education. Somewhere you have to think about yourself and let them sort of shoulder some of the burdens, even if you don't want to.

I mean, mothers bend over backwards to do things for their kids, but it may be time to sit down with someone and be a little more realistic about what you really have in your wallet.

Katie: I agree.

Kirtly: Well, it turns out that if you're in midlife, somewhere between 45 and 60, if you're in good health, there's still lots of time to make these plans and be able to create a plan for yourself that works.

You might need some help, and getting help is sometimes a little tricky, but it turns out that your credit union may have a financial advisor, someone who can help you do things. Sometimes people in your church can get financial advice. And the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, actually has a website just for people who need money help and they can help and get an advisor there for free.

So if you're not sure what you've got or if you don't think you're going to be able to make it, and you need some help thinking about it, this is the good time to do it. Waiting until you're 70, that's a little late.

Any other big ideas, Katie?

Katie: I was thinking hopefully we can put a link to maybe one or two good financial advisor resources in the show notes if people are interested.

Kirtly: Yeah, Money Smart. If you just Google Money Smart, it will get you to the FDIC's website. And we can probably put some other resources for people.

Katie: Perfect.

Kirtly: It turns out that United Way often can get people . . . United Way is an umbrella organization for many, many different resources for people in the community, and that includes financial planning and financial resources.

So United Way is another organization that can help connect you with financial . . . not so much money, they're not going to give you money, but they can connect you with people who can offer you resources if you need them. They can connect you with advisors. But Money Smart, that can get you started.

Katie: Awesome.

Kirtly: Well, if you're in midlife, you should know what's in your bank account and your retirement plan if you have one. This is the time to figure it out.

Thanks for joining us. If this is your first listen to the 7 Domains of Midlife series, check out the rest of our 7 Domains of Midlife at womens7.com. It's the Katie and Kirtly show for this particular topic, and for topics going forward. So join us on the next and the lasts, and follow us through our midlife journey. Thanks.