Helping Women Face Longevity Risk

The well-known fact that wives tend to outlive their husbands could hit financial professionals harder than they realize.

Speakers talked about the “longevity mismatch” between spouses and other aspects of longevity today during a seminar sponsored by a unit of Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Hartford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Age Lab.

Among the threads that baby boomers and their financial advisors are going to need to sort out is juggling care of elderly parents and children.

Many boomers are already at risk of outliving their retirement income, in part because they tend to fawn over their children, and many give paying for their children’s education a higher priority than investing for retirement, speakers said.

Female boomers are at even greater risk than other boomers because “aging is a female sport,” said Joseph Coughlin, the founding director of the Age Lab.

Financial professionals just have to look at their older clients to see that wives tend to outlive husbands.