Women who work with a financial advisor feel better prepared for retirement, according to new LIMRA research.
The Windsor, Conn.-based financial research organization surveyed Americans between the ages of 40 and 85 who had at least $100,000 in household investable assets. The resulting report, called “Impact of Financial Professionals on Retirement Security,” found that 40% of women who work with a financial professional say they feel very prepared for retirement, compared with just 27% of women who don’t work with an advisor.
Perhaps that’s not surprising. Those who have professional guidance are more likely to have completed key retirement planning activities. But the extent of the difference is startling.
For instance, 53% of women with an advisor had calculated the amount of assets and investments they would have available to spend in retirement, while that applied to only 44% of women who did not have an advisor. Half had estimated how long their retirement portfolios would last, whereas only 36% of women without an advisor had made that calculation. When it comes to determining expenses in retirement, 48% of women with an advisor had completed the task. Just 43% of unadvised women had. Though only 37% of women with an advisor had developed a specific plan or strategy for generating income from retirement savings, that far outstripped the 22% of women without an advisor who had done that.
In fact, on a measure of six financial planning tasks, a mere 12% of women who consulted a financial professional had utterly failed to complete any of them. The same was true for 20% of women who never consulted a financial professional. They had completed none of the tasks.
LIMRA’s research also found that women who worked with a financial professional were more than twice as likely to have a formal written retirement plan. Fully 25% of them had a plan, versus just 10% of women who did not have a financial advisor.
Getting into the details of historical trends and changes, the study showed that women’s interest in guaranteed lifetime income had increased 63% over the past five years, with a significant jump over the past year as inflation and economic uncertainty grew.
Those who worked with an advisor were more likely to purchase an annuity to provide that guaranteed lifetime income. The percentage of women with an advisor who are interested in annuities jumped 20 percentage points since 2018, to 52%. This compares to 44% of those without one, a rise of 17 percentage points since 2018.