Have you ever said,

"Why didn't someone tell me this before?"

"If I had known then what I know now."

The security of a woman's financial future is more uncertain today than at any time in history. Job security, inflation, the impact of shifting responsibility for retirement benefits from the company to the worker, and the question of Social Security and Medicare benefits in the future concern us all.

Women lead different financial lives than men. They live longer, make less money, enter and leave the workforce more often, suffer more monetarily from divorce, and are generally more financially conservative. For these reasons, even happily married women need to think of themselves as "financially single" throughout their lives if they wish to become financially secure and independent during their later years.

If women over 65 who are now living in or near poverty had learned how to plan for their financial security when they were in their twenties and thirties, could they have prevented this situation? Chances are they would have tried, and many would have succeeded had someone warned them about their potentially precarious situations.

This series of planning guides has been designed to help women of all ages develop skills they need in order to handle their financial affairs successfully, now and in the future. Their mothers probably taught them how to shop, pay bills, and balance the checkbook, but most women didn't learn money management skills from their mothers or their peers. They may be learning the expensive way, from the school of hard knocks, which can be a very harsh teacher!

When we are in our early or middle working years, being 65 and able to retire seems light years away. We have been conditioned to think that retirement means living a relaxed lifestyle on our own schedule, doing things we have always wanted to do such as travel, shop, and enjoy life. In reality, two-thirds of retirees don't have enough savings and retirement income to cover their living expenses. In less than one year after retirement, more than one-third of retirees return to work, either full or part-time, because doing so is the only way they can make ends meet.

After a lifetime of work, many women retire to Social Security benefits as their only income, condemning them to poverty in their final years. Too late, they realize that they should have relied more upon their own savings for security and less upon employer pensions and Social Security. Contrary to popular belief, no one "out there" is going to take care of you if you don't plan ahead. No one plans to fail, they just fail to plan.

Unfortunately, if women plan at all, most don't start planning for their financial future and retirement until their late forties or fifties. By 2000, more than 19 million women will be over 65, and many will never have planned for the financial requirements of old age. No matter what your age, it's never too late to prepare for your financial security by taking responsibility for financial decisions. But, the closer you are to retirement, the more dedicated you must be in turning your dreams into goals.