What Older Women Desperately Want to Tell Younger Women About Money

Investigators from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently set up a wave of 14 focus group interviews, to find out what women over 70 are really thinking about retirement.

Resources

• A copy of the GAO report is available here.
• An article about a GAO report about women and Social Security is available here.

Session group managers got 190 women to answer written questionnaires and talk about their fears. The team included an open-ended question that gave the women a chance to say, in their own words, what advice they would give younger women about how to prepare financially for retirement. About 163 of the women responded to that question. For a list of the four most popular answers, see the slideshow above. The GAO also got the women talking about other matters. In 12 focus groups, for example, women reported having good experiences with seeking financial advice. In 10, however, some of the women reported negative experiences, such as receiving poor advice or paying high fees. — Read Selling Financial Safety Masks, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.