Another insight into Australia's persistent retirement-savings gender gap

Link here. Excerpt:

'This research, How Australia Saves – a collaboration between Vanguard and Sunsuper – draws on the transactions and investment experiences of more than a million Sunsuper members.
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As research by actuaries and consultants Rice Warner shows, average super balances are higher for males than females in all age groups. However, the gap "increases markedly" from age 35 when the majority of women take time off to have children and may lose opportunities for promotion at work.

After interrupting their careers to raise families, women often have difficulties returning to the workforce at an acceptable level. And one of the fundamental reasons for the retirement-savings gender gap is that women have lower average incomes than men.

Further, women frequently struggle to restore their finances after divorce because of family obligations and, again, their lower average incomes. Yet women have to stretch their retirement savings over longer life expectancies than men.

As Rice Warner has emphasised, potential solutions for the retirement-saving gender gap will have to come from the combined efforts of government, super funds (with education and advice), employers and individual members.'

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Comments

Simple: Women expect they'll outlive their husbands, so don't bother saving more for retirement. Men OTOH save more bc they expect to die before their wives and want to leave it to them.

What narratives like the article's fail to do is recognize that a man's retirement savings is, if he's married, more his wife's than his, at least the amt he contributed while married to her. Women know if for any reason they divorce, so long as she has kept her own income and savings rate under her husband's, she can go after his savings. They aren't mentioning this. Single women save less for retirement before marriage generally bc they count on getting married later, thus they anticipate getting the savings of a husband they haven't even met yet.

The best protection against being plundered by an ex-wife a man has is to refrain from getting married, period. The next best is if he gets married, do not have kids. Thus marrying after say, 40, to a woman your own age, is better. Be careful, also, who you marry. Make sure she is bent on continuing to work and pay her own way. Once you let a woman you are married to start living off you, the courts will see it as her being "dependent" on you... vs. what it really is, her exploiting and using you.

Why men are still getting married, I dunno. Most I guess just succomb to emotional blackmail or are ignorant of the implications re what they are doing. In the first case, best advice is to break up w/ her when the strong-arm "marry me" tactics start up: angry tirades, withholding sex, flirting openly in front of you with others, and cheating. Odd how women still want men to propose but they are the ones who still want to get married. As for the second issue, education is critical. Telling men considering marriage abt the hazards thereof is doing them a great favor. MRAs have to bc the schools sure aren't.

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