Prime Time - Jane Fonda [115]
—MARY CATHERINE BATESON
NOW, IN THE FIRST HALF OF MY SEVENTIES, I REALIZE THAT MY future is right now, today, this very minute. Never has the expression “If not now, when?” been more relevant. Let’s not blind ourselves to the realities that lie just around the corner, realities that, with proper forethought, can be manageable—or, with denial, can make our last decades miserable. One of these days I’ll make a will, start saving money, figure out what will happen if Bill dies first… This Second Act thinking is a recipe for trouble in the Third Act. Backing out of the bedroom to avoid displaying a dimpled rump is one thing; backing into our futures is quite another! I hope younger women reading this book will begin to prepare for the future right now, when it can be easier and less costly.
“People generally overvalue the present and undervalue the future … and it’s very clearly a phenomenon that applies to decision-making about money,” writes Dr. Laura Carstensen in her book A Long Bright Future: An Action Plan for a Lifetime of Happiness, Health, and Financial Security.1 “We’ll let our future selves deal with living on less so we can live on more now,” says Dr. Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.
In an effort to see if virtual reality might be used to help people better relate to their older selves, researchers at the Center on Longevity work with young volunteers who don virtual-reality helmets, look into computer-generated “mirrors,” and see their own older self, their own avatar, looking back at them. Half the volunteers see themselves at their present age; the other half see themselves forty-five years in the future, bags, jowls, wrinkles, and all. The researchers then have the “aged” volunteers perform different interactive tasks with their avatar, and this appears to enable them to connect emotionally with their older selves. “At the study’s conclusion,” writes Dr. Carstensen, “participants are asked to decide how to allocate a $1,000 windfall. Interestingly, participants who see their older selves in the mirror allocate significantly more money to retirement.”
Not all of us can avail ourselves of this morphing technology, so we have to try hard to envision ourselves at, say, sixty, seventy, and eighty. Have we saved money? Possibly not. Only half of the older baby boomers are saving enough for a comfortable retirement. This is a serious dilemma for women, in particular, since older women are twice as likely to be poor as men. During our lifetimes, the one-paycheck family became less common. Women in ever-increasing numbers entered the workforce; many of those women have been widows and divorcees, and they weren’t working for “pin money.” These women needed to increase their Social Security benefits and maintain their health care coverage. But women start off earning only up to 81 percent of what men earn (often doing the exact same work), and, because we live longer, the effects of reduced benefits in an economic downturn are especially onerous for us. It’s a burden, particularly for the more than two million divorced women, who far outnumber the widows. In their book Project Renewment, Bernice Brattner and Helen Dennis write, “The annual median income for women 65 and older is about $3,000 above the Census definition of poverty, or $11,816. Ninety percent of all women, at some time in their lives, will be totally responsible for their own financial welfare.”2
Financial Planning
Ask yourself these questions: Do you have investments, and how much are they likely to earn for you? What benefits—your own or your husband’s—will support you? If you are married and your husband has a private pension, has he elected to provide survivorship coverage for you? If he has a 401(k) retirement plan at work, are you sure you are named as the beneficiary? Similarly,