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One of the few women in my graduating engineering class told me the same thing when we were going through interviews and I didn't quite understand it. She found it condescending that she was being offered a higher starting pay than male candidates simply because she was a woman. It made sense to me though. Companies were trying to avoid discrimination lawsuits and starting salary offers were being dictated by supply and demand.
I can understand that, but it’s probably still better to be on her side of it then the other way that it used to be. I had a patient before her graduated law school in the late 1950’s. She said no law firm would even interview her. Almost a year after graduating, she finally got a job working for the state. But the public sector was her only opportunity. And even then, they were allowed to ask her at the job interview if she was on birth control.
And times have changed, but it’s really not done yet, and it didn’t all change a long time ago. It was only seven years ago that General Motors first female CEO was not allowed to join the male-only golf club that the other executives and their clients belonged to. There are other ways to hold women back aside from direct, overt job discrimination.
At present we both collect SS. His is more than mine.
He has two pensions.
If I go first, which is unlikely since I am healthy and 67, he loses my SS of about $900 minus $300 for Medicare, et al. The pensions remain in place.
If he goes first which is the likely scenario since he is 80 and very sick, I lose my SS and collect his. The pensions are reduced by half. My income would go down by about $1800 per month.
So he wouldn't have to sell the house but I would. His lifestyle wouldn't change at all. Mine would change drastically. Is that fair? I lose sleep worrying about all this.
Whether male or female, those who were raised by supportive families, with helpful guidance and the expectation of obtaining a good education/career, have a big advantage over the rest of us. Someone with average ambition will do much better under those circumstances than with parents who are dysfunctional/disinterested. I also think the (still persistent) idea that procreation is the way to happiness for every woman should be abolished. Leaving family planning up to women would go a long way toward more female financial security in the future.
At present we both collect SS. His is more than mine.
He has two pensions.
If I go first, which is unlikely since I am healthy and 67, he loses my SS of about $900 minus $300 for Medicare, et al. The pensions remain in place.
If he goes first which is the likely scenario since he is 80 and very sick, I lose my SS and collect his. The pensions are reduced by half. My income would go down by about $1800 per month.
So he wouldn't have to sell the house but I would. His lifestyle wouldn't change at all. Mine would change drastically. Is that fair? I lose sleep worrying about all this.
This is the way it seems to work out all too often.
At present we both collect SS. His is more than mine.
He has two pensions.
If I go first, which is unlikely since I am healthy and 67, he loses my SS of about $900 minus $300 for Medicare, et al. The pensions remain in place.
If he goes first which is the likely scenario since he is 80 and very sick, I lose my SS and collect his. The pensions are reduced by half. My income would go down by about $1800 per month.
So he wouldn't have to sell the house but I would. His lifestyle wouldn't change at all. Mine would change drastically. Is that fair? I lose sleep worrying about all this.
I'm in the same situation. However, we are purchasing our "forever home" soon. Our property taxes will be low enough for my finances if widowed.
We could have stayed in New York as a married couple. We knew I couldn't afford our property taxes on my social security alone. In fact, our old property taxes would be more than my yearly social security payments!
My wife of 30 years is an LPN,, but due to health issues can't work anymore.
We don't have kids, don't travel since we got out of the military, don't take lavish vacations or drive new cars.
For much of our married life I was sole support. I took a job I hated but with good benefits. There was a good pension and I also invested in a supplemental retirement plan.
I got the chance to retire early and rolled my supplemental plan over into a land purchase. My pension is set up so that I take a little less now, but if I go first she'll receive my full pension payments as long as she lives.
Yes I'm old fashioned and see my wife's welfare as my responsibility so between my pension, her SSI and mine, as well as selling the property if she needs to, she will be provided for.
I took that responsibility for her and I when we married. I feel it's incumbent on me to fulfill that responsibility, and I have. She'll never have to be cold or hungry, she won't have to fear losing our home, and her medical is also taken care of.
It's what married couples used to do. Take care of each other.
I feel the same way.
My wife has always been a full and equal partner and maybe I always earned more money but she is the one who made it possible. Maybe I earned more money but in many ways she worked harder than I did.
I am 73 and still working full time because I love what I do and nearly 100% of my job income goes into savings for her should she outlive me. If she ended up in poverty I couldn't live with myself.
I would like to see social security changed instead of the wife receiving 50% of her husbands benefit. I think the benefit should be split evening so if a husband currently receives $2,000 and the wife receives $1,000 each should get the equal amount of $1,500. In the event of a death the survivor receives the $2,000.
I believe the issue is partly because most women don't start out in their 20's making financial decisions for future financial security as they tend to focus on getting married and assuming their financial security will be at least half provided by their husband. This is a mistake, as marriage isn't any guarantee. Many people get divorced. Also if the husband dies, she might still have a mortage on the house and might not have sufficient income to manage the household expenses. Many married women only work part time and if they do work full time, the job might be low paying. Many households require 2 incomes to get by let alone building up resources for retirement.
If a woman doesn't marry and makes it on her own but doesn't have a strong financial situation--job isn't high paying and she isn't saving or investing, then she isn't going to make it financially when she's elderly.
It all comes down to the fact that women don't prioritize their own financial security when they're young. They pick low paying careers and don't prioritize working at a high level through their adult lives. This isn't meant to ding them, it's just the facts.
I have an elderly friend right now who is struggling financially in retirement. As I see it, she made many financial mistakes, no one caused this issue but herself. Some of the mistakes she made were: 1) choosing a low paying teaching job because she "loved" it rather than considering a higher paying teaching job that might not be as much "fun" but would have provided a better financial picture for her as a single woman; 2) buying a house she couldn't afford and now refusing to move out of it despite the fact that she can't afford to maintain it; 3) not saving or investing for her future but spending her slim salary on travelling and decorating; 4) made bad decision to suddenly quit her job one day when she got lambasted about something (moral to story--don't quit job if you can't afford to); 5) taking SS too early.
There are a lot of kernels of wisdom in looking at someone else's mistakes and recognizing that there's no shortcut to financial security in retirement. It starts with smart decisions in one's 20's, willingness to work hard and save, not depending on others to provide for us, and other smart decisions.
Your elderly friend who is now struggling was raised in an era when women were not encouraged or raised to work outside the home. If they did, there were few "careers" open to them. I am in my 60s and retired. When I was young, the school counsellor told me I could go to college and be anything I wanted to be: a teacher, a secretary, or a nurse. If I became a teacher, I could be home when the kids got home from school, she said. Those were the main options open to girls. I remember considering airline stewardess. The pay was horrible but the job seemed exciting. But the rules gave me pause...I was normal weight, but read that a stewardess could get fired if she gained 5 lbs...or if she got pregnant (even if married). There were no female doctors in my small city. Companies didn't hire female engineers. A girl could pretty much forget about getting hired for anything that was a male dominated field, which were almost all the good paying jobs.
So enter all the jokes about girls going to college to find a husband, because the reality was that she was going to marry, anyway, so the best financial option for many was to find a husband who had prospects. Even if she did that, as a widow she could look forward to only half her husband's social security.
Husbands of married women back then did not want their wives to work. Their job, as the husbands saw it, was to take care of them, the kids, the house, the meals. Even if a wife worked (usually a lower class couple), she was still expected to continue with all her wifely duties.
If a woman didn't marry and worked, how was she to know about investing and financial matters? Unlike boys, girls weren't educated for that. Fathers usu. didn't talk to their daughters about financial matters - the few fathers who knew anything about investing and saving for the future. Her one good option was a company that had a pension, so it was automatic.
Even when a woman managed to get a male-dominated field job, she was usually paid less. That translated to much lower Social Security benefits. Lawsuits had to be filed to force companies to hire qualified women, and literally an Act of Congress had to be passed to force companies to pay women fairly (that was just in 2009).
One example was Lilly Ledbetter. She had worked in a male dominated factory job @ Goodyear for yrs. Late in the game she found out she was paid substantially less (almost HALF) than her male counterparts with the same job. She sued for back pay. She won $223,000 in back pay and $3 Million Dollars punitive. But the Supreme Court reversed it and ruled she had to have sued within 180 days of her first paycheck. Imagine her employers looking at her in the face day in and day out for years, knowing she was paid substantially less than the men because she was a woman. I'd guess her Social Security isn't much, and of course, not nearly what her male counterparts get.
Your friend did make some mistakes, but in the end, who knows how much difference the trips and the job would've made? Who among us didn't make mistakes when we were young? Many men made those same mistakes, but because they had more jobs open to them, and those jobs paid significantly more, those men are doing far better than their female counterparts. Before we beat women up for not doing better financially, I think we should consider the era they were raised in, and the opportunities they had. Women are doing better now. Most college graduates, for example, are women. College graduates, on avg, earn more than non-grads, so that should translate to higher SS benefits, plus other retirement benefits from corporate jobs.
My wife of 30 years is an LPN,, but due to health issues can't work anymore.
We don't have kids, don't travel since we got out of the military, don't take lavish vacations or drive new cars.
For much of our married life I was sole support. I took a job I hated but with good benefits. There was a good pension and I also invested in a supplemental retirement plan.
I got the chance to retire early and rolled my supplemental plan over into a land purchase. My pension is set up so that I take a little less now, but if I go first she'll receive my full pension payments as long as she lives.
Yes I'm old fashioned and see my wife's welfare as my responsibility so between my pension, her SSI and mine, as well as selling the property if she needs to, she will be provided for.
I took that responsibility for her and I when we married. I feel it's incumbent on me to fulfill that responsibility, and I have. She'll never have to be cold or hungry, she won't have to fear losing our home, and her medical is also taken care of.
It's what married couples used to do. Take care of each other.
I agreed and we practice the same way.
At one point, it was inherently understood that's what men do.
At present we both collect SS. His is more than mine.
He has two pensions.
If I go first, which is unlikely since I am healthy and 67, he loses my SS of about $900 minus $300 for Medicare, et al. The pensions remain in place.
If he goes first which is the likely scenario since he is 80 and very sick, I lose my SS and collect his. The pensions are reduced by half. My income would go down by about $1800 per month.
So he wouldn't have to sell the house but I would. His lifestyle wouldn't change at all. Mine would change drastically. Is that fair? I lose sleep worrying about all this.
Unfortunately from a number's view point it is fair.
He makes MORE money than you during his working years. That's a fact.
But I question why you would loss 1/2 of his pension? Is that a choice he made? I choose the 100% spouse survival benefits eventhough it means I get a $2-$3 hundred dollars LESS per month.
Hold the effin phone. You've got to be kidding me.
1. Our society tells women that they are less intelligent than men. Girls in school are told to never look like they are smarter than the boys.
2. Our society tells women that they are not as strong as men. I'm talking more than physical strength.
3. Our society shames women for wanting careers. If a woman prioritizes career and making money over being a wife and mother, she gets called a "feminazi."
4. Women are paid a fraction of what men are paid. No, this isn't because women don't know how to negotiate. There is still the cultural belief that women can depend on their husbands to support them. So they can be paid less.
5. Women are told that they are less able to do math so that many (but not all) become intimidated by finances.
6. Many men are intimidated by high earning women. Many married men go out of their way to control family finances.
Basically, there is a cultural issue where women are taught to be dependent on men. Women would pick higher paying career if men weren't intimidated by women and make it hard for them in the workplace. You all remember the Google incident from a few years ago where a male employee sent out a companywide manifesto declaring that women were notbiologically made for high paying jobs. It's this type of BS that still permeates our society.
SO, if we are so concerned with women and their financial security, the best thing we can do is to tell women to get all the education they can get, prioritize their career, earn the largest salary possible, reduce the number of children or have no children at all. This will make more women financially secure.
As a single woman, I made it a priority to make a six figure salary.
Sounds like you have been asleep for a while. It's not 1950.
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