Wealth, on Your Terms: A More Intentional Approach for Women

Many financial planning and investments gets built around a life that looks nothing like yours — steady earnings, a single career arc, a retirement that starts and ends on schedule. If that's not how your life has unfolded, you're not the exception. You're the majority. That gap isn't a flaw in you — it's a flaw in the planning, and one worth naming plainly and solving.

You've worked too hard, sacrificed too much, and built too much to leave your financial future to chance — or to advisors who don't understand your story.

The Reality of Women & Wealth

The numbers tell a story that may often go unaddressed. These aren't soft topics. They're real, quantifiable risks that deserve a specialized approach.

• 5–7 years — the longer average lifespan for women, meaning retirement savings must stretch further, often alone.

• 80% of women become solely responsible for their finances at some point in their lifetime — through divorce, widowhood, or never marrying.

• $1.1M — the average lifetime earnings gap between men and women, compounded by time out of the workforce for caregiving.

• 47% of women over 75 live alone, making income sustainability and healthcare planning critical, not optional.

• 66% of caregivers in the U.S. are women, often stepping back from income and retirement savings during peak earning years.

• 2× — how much more likely women are to enter retirement with less savings than men, even with comparable incomes.

• $30 trillion by 2030 — the wealth women are expected to control within this decade.

The Great Wealth Transfer — driven by inheritance, longevity, and growing earning power — is already underway. Most women will navigate this shift without a trusted, fiduciary partner. That's exactly the gap we exist to close.

Additional research reinforces this: a 2024 T. Rowe Price study found women had 30% less saved for retirement than men on average, and McKinsey found 53% of women's assets remain unmanaged, versus 45% for men — dollars quietly missing years of growth, not a reflection of ability or judgment.

Where We Meet You

Every woman's story is different. We bring fiduciary, specialized expertise to the chapters that shape a woman's financial life:

• Divorce & Transition — tax-aware asset restructuring and a retirement model for your new household, at your pace.

• Widowhood — immediate cash flow stabilization, survivor benefit optimization, and a long-term income plan.

• Entrepreneurial Women — business-to-personal wealth coordination, retirement plan design, and exit planning.

• High-Income Professionals — equity compensation, Roth conversions, and tax-bucket optimization so income builds freedom, not just a tax bill.

• Inherited Wealth — inherited IRA rules, step-up in basis, and an estate plan that reflects your goals.

• Caregiving & Retirement Gaps — catch-up contributions, Social Security optimization, and long-term care planning for the years you gave to someone else.

The Gaps Most Plans Never Close

These are structural patterns, not personal shortcomings:

• Retirement savings gap — caregiving interruptions reduce lifetime Social Security and contributions, often by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• Longevity risk — women outlive men by 5–7 years (CDC: 81.4 vs. 76.5), so plans must stretch further.

• Sudden financial responsibility — divorce or loss often forces major, irreversible decisions under emotional duress.

• Underestimating their own wealth — leads to overly conservative strategies that cost real compounding over decades.

• Tax drag on high earnings — without proactive strategy, income converts to wealth more slowly than it should.

• Conflicted or dismissive advice — women are more likely to get product-focused advice or have concerns minimized. A fiduciary changes that.

The wage gap threads through all of it: women earned roughly 85 cents per male dollar in 2024 (Pew), compounding quietly into smaller contributions, matches, and Social Security benefits.

The Chapter Many Plans Overlook: Healthcare and Long-Term Care

A healthy 65-year-old woman could face about $313,000 in healthcare costs over retirement, versus $275,000 for a man (2025 Milliman Retiree Health Cost Index) — driven by both longevity and higher late-life costs. About 1 in 4 women will need long-term care for more than five years (vs. roughly 1 in 6 men), averaging 3.6 years of care; a private nursing home room runs about $129,575 a year (CareScout).

Women are also more likely to face these years alone: after 75, 43% live alone versus 24% of men (U.S. Census), often after outliving a spouse. A plan built around two incomes and two Social Security checks can fracture fast when one spouse passes — leaving years of healthcare and care costs the original plan never modeled. For many women, this is the single most consequential chapter a retirement plan needs to get right.

Common questions

Why do women tend to have less saved for retirement than men, even with similar incomes?

The retirement savings gap reflects several structural factors: career interruptions for caregiving reduce both retirement contributions and Social Security benefits over time, a gender wage gap limits how much can be saved year over year, and women are less likely on average to have access to employer-sponsored retirement plans while caregiving. The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found the median household retirement savings for women is $56,000 — roughly half the $92,000 median for men — and the gap persists across generations.

How does caregiving affect a woman's long-term financial security?

The financial cost of caregiving compounds over time. Women who leave the workforce to care for a family member can lose up to 20 percent of their Social Security benefits compared to women who work continuously, on top of reduced pension contributions and years of foregone salary. Research from the Family Caregiver Alliance found these losses can total more than $320,000 over a lifetime. A coordinated financial plan accounts for these gaps explicitly — through catch-up contributions, Social Security optimization, and retirement income modeling that reflects the actual career timeline.

We welcome a conversation on how we may help women build and preserve wealth intentionally.

Sources

• Median household retirement savings for women ($56,000) versus men ($92,000), and Gen X women's median of $77,000, per Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies

• Gender gap in retirement income (pension plus Social Security) was 32.6 percent in 2024, larger than the 28.0 percent gender gap in median earnings, per Institute for Women's Policy Research

• CDC 2024 data: female life expectancy at birth is 81.4 years; at age 65, women can expect 20.8 more years of life

• An estimated 66 percent of caregivers are female, per the Family Caregiver Alliance

• Women who leave the workforce to provide care can lose up to 20 percent of their Social Security benefits compared to women who work continuously