Closing the Knowledge Gap: Retirement Income Planning and Finding Guaranteed Income are Key Focus Areas for Women
Retirement literacy remains low overall, with 89% of women and 72% of men receiving a failing grade on a 38-question retirement literacy quiz. The research suggests retirement income plans are less formal or not well understood for men and women alike, further underscored by consumers’ lack of confidence:
Only one in four women (14%) feel knowledgeable about retirement income planning.Four in ten women (43%) feel less comfortable with investment risk because of the COVID-19 crisis.Only 16% of women feel very knowledgeable about investment considerations for retirement planning, though self-reported knowledge seems to increase with age and assets.Even fewer – 14% of women – feel knowledgeable about strategies for sustaining income in retirement.
Yet women demonstrate they are ready and willing to build a meaningful retirement plan. Six in ten women (61%) believe good advice from a financial professional is very important to satisfactory portfolio performance, more so than men who feel the same way.
Guaranteed income is also a major concern: seventy percent of women emphasize the value of guaranteed income sources, a total that is even higher among eight in ten (80%) Black women and Hispanic women (77%). Yet despite this perceived importance, women rate their own knowledge as low when it comes to the sources to build a guaranteed lifetime income:
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