Husbands and Wives on Different Pages When It Comes to Retirement

Here's a real shocker -- husbands and wives often have vastly different ideas on what their retirement will be like. Ha! Re-read that last sentence and replace "retirement" with anything else (like "vacation," "weekend," "entertainment" and so on) and it will be just as accurate. ;-)

But here are some hard facts from Yahoo on the issue as it relates to retirement:

Among more than 30% of couples, husbands and wives had completely different answers when asked about the age they plan to retire, what kind of lifestyle they expected in retirement, and whether they planned to keep working in retirement.

Only 39% of couples gave matching answers when asked which source of income would be their primary livelihood in retirement.

This isn't really a shocker to me. After all, usually one person in the family has complete grasp of the finances and the other simply knows the generalities. That's the way it is in our house. My wife knows the basics of our plans and where to find documents, etc. in case something happens to me, but she probably wouldn't be able to say what our primary source of income in retirement would be.

And I'm sure we would have different answers on when we expect to retire since we haven't really discussed it. After all, it's still 25 years in the future.

That said, I am a big believer in planning and making decisions regarding finances together -- which is what we do when the need arises. We consult each other when it comes to major purchases (like our pending vacation at Disney and our house-hunting) as well as overall planning (we discuss our budget at the beginning of each year.) But so far, we've held off on discussing the retirement questions noted above. We both do know that we're saving for retirement and, for the most part, how we're saving for retirement, but we haven't gotten beyond that.

I would guess that the closer a couple is to retirement the more agreement there is between the couple. But we're in the lower age level of the survey participants, so my thought is that's why we're not as in touch on this subject as some others.

For more on money and marriage, see these links:

• Financial Planning for the Second Half of Marriage

• Solve Marriage Spending Differences by Having a Personal Account

• The Relationship Between Money and Sex

Comments

[Chris]

In other words, 70% of couples agreed on what age to retire, and what their lifestyle would be like!

I'm not surprised that 39% of couples could not say where their retirement was coming from. Typically 1 person handles the bulk of the investments and finances.

Also this is a Fidelity Investments survey...did they survey their own customers? In that case, these numbers may be higher than usual, as customers of Fidelity would have a better grasp of their investments than the general population.

[Mark]

I would say that there is not always a lot more agreement as you get older. I see more divorces in the 50 to 65 range. I hope it is not a sign of the times

[Anitra]

I definitely wonder how the age groups might have skewed the results. How many young couples know where their retirement income will come from, or exactly when they'll retire? I know my husband and I have some vague ideas, but really, we don't really know what we'll be doing in 10 years, nevermind 40 or 50 years from now.