An Honest Answer for Women Approaching Retirement
If you are within a few years of retirement and you have started waking up in the night wondering whether you have actually saved enough, you are not alone, and you are not behind. You are asking the question that almost every thoughtful saver eventually asks, and it deserves a real answer instead of a rule of thumb. Retirement planning for women does not always align with typical advice.
The usual answers include “save 10 times your income,” “replace 70 to 80 percent of your working income” and they are merely starting points, not conclusions. They were built for an average household, and almost no one is actually average. They are especially incomplete for women, who tend to live longer, often manage the household finances, and are more likely to navigate retirement on their own at some point.
This piece walks through how to think about your number honestly, with the realities of being a woman in or near retirement built in, and with Oregon’s specific tax and estate environment factored along the way. It is meant to give you a clearer view, not a tidier one.
Key Takeaways
- Rules of thumb tend to understate what women need. A 25-to-30-year retirement is a reasonable planning assumption, not a worst case.
- The gender retirement-savings gap is real and well-documented. Recent Transamerica research shows women workers have roughly 60 percent of the retirement savings men do.
- Your number is built from the bottom up including your expenses, income sources, and the gap your savings need to cover. This is not a percentage of your current paycheck.
- Oregon’s tax picture has real upsides (no Social Security tax, no sales tax) and real challenges (a $1 million estate tax threshold and income tax up to 9.9%).
- Stress-testing your plan is not about scaring yourself. It is about being able to sleep at night because you checked all the details and already know what you would do if things went sideways.
Beyond Simple Rules of Thumb for Retirement Planning for Women
The classic “4 percent rule” suggests you can withdraw 4 percent of your retirement savings in your first year and adjust for inflation each year after. With $1 million saved, that is $40,000 in year one. It is a useful reference point, but it was originally built around a 30-year retirement, and it assumes a specific mix of stocks and bonds. For someone retiring at 65 who could easily live another 30 years, this may no longer fit.
Why Generic Rules May Not Fit Women
A few realities that change the math:
- Longer life expectancy. A 65-year-old woman today has, on average, about 21 more years of life ahead of her — but “average” is the wrong number to plan around. Roughly half of women at 65 will live past their mid-80s, about one in three will live past 90, and roughly one in seven will live past 95. For couples, the odds are even higher: there’s close to a 50% chance that at least one spouse in a healthy 65-year-old couple will see age 90. This is why I build retirement plans for clients out to age 90 or 95, not to life expectancy. Planning to the median is essentially planning for a coin flip on whether the money lasts.
- Longer retirements. A 25-to-30-year planning horizon isn’t pessimistic — it’s what the longevity math above actually requires. The women in Transamerica’s most recent survey who set a target life expectancy plan to age 90 (median), with 15 percent planning to 100 or beyond. Those instincts are right.
- Greater odds of being on your own at some point. Whether through outliving a spouse, divorce, or never marrying, many women will manage finances solo for at least part of retirement. A plan that only works if both spouses are alive is not really a plan.
- Caregiving responsibilities. More than four in 10 working women (43 percent) have served as caregivers, compared with 35 percent of men, and 11 percent of caregiving women have left a job because of it. Time out of the workforce affects lifetime earnings, retirement contributions, and Social Security.
The Gender Retirement Gap Is Real — Here Is What It Actually Looks Like
It is easy to read “women have less saved than men” and tune it out as a familiar headline. The numbers are more striking than the headline suggests.
Transamerica’s 25 Facts About Women’s Retirement Outlook (November 2025) included some relevant findings that matter for planning:
- Only 18 percent of women workers are very confident they will be able to retire with a comfortable lifestyle, compared with 27 percent of men.
- Just 25 percent of women have a written retirement strategy. Another 44 percent have a plan but it is not written down, and 32 percent have no plan at all.
- Only 32 percent of women workers currently use a financial advisor.
- Women’s greatest retirement fear is outliving their savings (44 percent), followed closely by Social Security being reduced and declining health requiring long-term care (both 43 percent).
- More than four in 10 women (43 percent) expect to provide financial support to family members during retirement: most often parents, adult children, or grandchildren.
None of these are reasons to panic. They are reasons to write things down.
Income Replacement: Why a Percentage of Your Paycheck Misses the Point
The standard advice, replace 70 to 80 percent of your working income, assumes your mortgage will be paid off, you will stop saving for retirement, and your taxes will drop. Sometimes that is true. Often it is not, especially in the first decade of retirement when travel, family support, and home projects tend to cluster.
Costs That May Go Up
- A longer retirement means more years to fund.
- Solo household costs if you outlive a spouse (housing, utilities, insurance often do not scale down proportionally).
- Healthcare and long-term care costs that climb with age.
- Helping adult children or aging parents. The “sandwich” years sometimes extend into retirement.
- Travel and lifestyle goals while you are still healthy and mobile.
Costs That May Go Down
- A paid-off mortgage.
- No more retirement contributions out of your paycheck.
- Lower taxes, depending on where your income comes from.
- Commuting, work clothes, and other work-related expenses.
The cleaner approach is to build a retirement budget from the ground up structured around what you actually want your life to look like, and then back into the savings number that supports it.
Oregon Tax Realities Worth Knowing
Oregon’s tax picture has clear upsides and clear costs:
- Oregon does not tax Social Security benefits, which can be worth a meaningful amount each year for retirees.
- Oregon income tax tops out at 9.9 percent, which applies to traditional retirement account withdrawals.
- Oregon’s estate tax still kicks in at $1 million, far below the federal exemption of $15 million for 2026. This affects far more middle-class Oregon families than most people realize.
The Role of Social Security
Social Security is the foundation under most retirement plans, and getting the claiming decision right is one of the highest-leverage choices you will make. Your benefit is based on your 35 highest-earning years, so years out of the workforce for caregiving, or years of lower pay, are baked into the calculation.
Spousal and Survivor Benefits — Especially Important for Women
If you are married, divorced after at least 10 years of marriage, or widowed, you may be eligible for benefits based on your spouse’s or former spouse’s record. These are not edge cases, they are central to most retirement plans for women.
In many couples, having the higher earner delay claiming until age 70 maximizes the survivor benefit the surviving spouse will eventually receive, often for many years. This is one of the most important and most overlooked decisions in retirement planning.
If you are within a few years of retirement and have not modeled what your income would look like if your spouse died first, that is a conversation worth having soon. Not because anything is wrong, but because the answer is much easier to act on now than it is in the middle of grief.
Investment Strategy for a Long Retirement
There is an old guideline that says your bond allocation should equal your age. 60 percent bonds at age 60, 70 percent at age 70, and so on. For someone facing a 25-to-30-year retirement, that is often too conservative. Inflation over three decades is a much bigger risk than most people give it credit for.
There is no one right allocation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. The right mix depends on your time horizon, your other income sources, your spending flexibility, and how you actually behave when markets fall. A plan that looks great on paper but causes you to sell at the bottom is worse than a more conservative plan you can live with.
A Few Principles That Matter More Than the Specific Numbers
- Hold enough stable assets, cash and short-term bonds, that you never have to sell stocks at a loss to cover near-term expenses.
- Maintain enough growth exposure to outpace inflation over the long pull. A 30-year retirement with no growth assets is its own kind of risk.
- Diversify globally and keep costs low. The decisions you control matter more than the ones you cannot.
- Tax location matters: which assets sit in which type of account (traditional, Roth, taxable) can meaningfully affect what you actually keep.
Oregon-Specific Retirement Planning Notes
Estate Planning Under Oregon’s $1 Million Threshold
Oregon’s estate tax exemption is $1 million, and unlike the federal exemption, there is no portability between spouses. That means a couple cannot automatically combine their exemptions without planning, the surviving spouse may be left with only their own $1 million exemption, even though they now own everything.
For an Oregon family with a paid-off home in a desirable neighborhood, a healthy retirement portfolio, some life insurance, and maybe a rental property or business interest, hitting $1 million is not an abstract concept. Strategies that can help:
- Annual gifting (up to $19,000 per recipient in 2026 without reporting requirements) to gradually reduce the estate. You can gift more, up to the federal unified estate and gift tax exemption, but you need to file an informational return with the IRS. You should talk to a qualified tax advisor about planned gifts over $19,000 per year. There is no gift tax in Oregon.
- Credit shelter or bypass trust planning so both spouses’ exemptions get used. This planning must be done while both spouses are alive.
- Charitable giving strategies, which can serve both planning and personal goals. Charitable planning can either transfer assets during life or as part of the estate administration. Both will reduce the taxable estate.
- Life insurance held in a specialized trust to provide liquidity for estate taxes if needed.
Planning for the Unexpected
A complete plan is not one that assumes everything goes right. It is one that already knows what to do if things do not.
Sequence-of-Returns Risk
A market downturn in your first few years of retirement does more lasting damage than the same downturn ten years in. The reason is mechanical: when you sell investments to cover expenses while they are down, those shares are gone. They cannot recover when the market does. Protecting against this does not require predicting the market. It requires having a buffer of stable assets so you do not have to sell stocks at the wrong time.
Healthcare and Long-Term Care
This is the category most people underestimate, and it is the one most likely to derail a retirement plan. Realistic Oregon-area planning numbers:
- Long-term care: roughly $10,000 to $12,000 per month for a private nursing home room in Oregon, based on Genworth’s most recent Cost of Care data. Assisted living and in-home care are lower but still significant.
- Medicare supplement (Medigap) insurance
- Out-of-pocket prescription drug costs: often $1,500 to $4,000 per year, and more if you are managing a chronic condition.
- Dental and vision care, which Medicare generally does not cover
Inflation
Inflation is the silent risk in any long retirement. Even at a modest long-term average, prices roughly double over 25 years. Healthcare costs have historically risen faster than general inflation. A plan that looks comfortable in today’s dollars can feel tight 15 years in if inflation is not built into the math from the start.
The Caregiving Years Most Plans Don’t Account For
There’s a chapter of retirement that almost no one talks about until they’re in it: the years when one spouse is seriously ill and the other becomes the caregiver, the decision-maker, and the person quietly watching the bills add up. Because men typically die first, this responsibility falls to women more often than not — and it usually arrives without warning, in the middle of an otherwise well-built plan.
The financial decisions in those years are some of the hardest a person will ever make. How long can we afford in-home care before we have to consider a facility? Do we spend down the retirement accounts now, or protect them for the years I’ll spend alone afterward? Is it worth pursuing an experimental treatment that insurance won’t cover? Can we keep the house? Should we?
These questions don’t have clean answers. They involve money, but they’re not really about money — they’re about love, dignity, and what you can live with later. And they almost always have to be made quickly, while the person making them is exhausted and grieving in advance.
What I have seen, over and over, is that the families who navigate this well are the ones who talked about it before they had to. Not in detail, and not morbidly — just enough to have a shared understanding of the boundaries. Where do we draw the line on out-of-pocket medical costs? What do we want the surviving spouse’s life to look like financially? What do we not want to do, even if it feels like the loving choice in the moment?
A few things that make a real difference if they’re in place ahead of time:
- A clear understanding of what long-term care insurance you have, if any, and what it actually covers. Many people don’t know until they need it.
- A health care directive and a financial power of attorney that have been updated recently and that the surviving spouse can actually find.
- An honest conversation about whether you would want care at home or in a facility, and what trade-offs you’re willing to make for each.
- A retirement plan that has already modeled the surviving spouse’s finances — not just at the moment of death, but through the caregiving years that may come first.
- A trusted advisor, attorney, or family member the surviving spouse can call when the decisions feel impossible. Not for the answer, but for a steady voice.
This is hard to talk about. It is also one of the most loving things a couple can do for each other, because it means the spouse left behind is not making the worst decisions of their life alone, in the dark, while their world is ending. The plan is the gift.
Building Your Personal Retirement Number
The cleanest way to find your number is to work in three steps.
Step 1: Build Your Retirement Budget From the Ground Up
Start with the life you actually want, not a percentage of your current income. The big buckets typically include:
- Housing: mortgage or rent, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities.
- Healthcare: Medicare premiums, supplemental insurance, out-of-pocket costs, long-term care planning.
- Daily living: food, transportation, household, insurance.
- The good stuff: travel, hobbies, family experiences, gifts, charitable giving.
- Support for others: aging parents, adult children, grandchildren if applicable.
Step 2: Add Up Your Income Sources
- Social Security (use ssa.gov for your actual estimate, not a guess).
- Pension income, if you have it.
- Annuity payments, if applicable.
- Rental income, business income, or part-time work you actually want to do.
Step 3: Solve for the Gap
Subtract your guaranteed income from your annual budget. The difference is what your investment portfolio needs to cover.
Stress-Testing Your Plan
Stress-testing is not meant to scare you. It is meant to give you the answer to “what would we do if…” before you actually need it. A good plan can survive reasonable bad outcomes.
Scenarios Worth Modeling
- A 30 percent market decline in the first year of retirement.
- A long-term care event lasting three to five years.
- Living to 95 instead of 85.
- One spouse dying ten years earlier than expected.
- Several years of higher-than-expected inflation.
A plan that holds up across most of these scenarios, even if it requires some adjustment, is doing what a plan is supposed to do.
If You Think You Are Behind
If your numbers suggest you are not where you want to be, you have more options than you might think. None of them are quick fixes, but they are real.
- Maximize Catch-Up Contributions (Age 50 and Older)
- Working a couple of additional years can have an outsized impact: more savings, fewer years of withdrawals, often a larger Social Security benefit, and potentially delayed Medicare and pension decisions.
- Part-time work in early retirement, if you want to, can dramatically reduce the pressure on your portfolio in the years that matter most.
- Right-sizing housing whether that means downsizing, relocating, or paying off the mortgage can shift the math meaningfully.
- Getting tax-efficient about which accounts you draw from first. The order of withdrawals can extend portfolio life by years.
Questions Clients Actually Ask
I’ve saved diligently for years. Why isn’t a simple rule of thumb good enough?
Because rules of thumb are built around an average household, and your situation is not average. They do not know how long you might live, what your healthcare picture looks like, what your tax situation is, whether you have pension income, or what your real spending will be. The closer you get to retirement, the more those specifics matter, and the less a generic rule can tell you.
How does Oregon’s tax situation actually affect my plan?
It cuts both ways. The lack of state tax on Social Security and the absence of sales tax help. The 9.9 percent top income tax rate on traditional retirement account withdrawals and the $1 million estate tax threshold are real costs that need to be planned around, particularly if you have a paid-off home, retirement accounts, and any other assets that add up.
I’m starting later than I’d like. Is it too late?
No. It is rarely as late as it feels. Catch-up contributions, working a few additional years, smart Social Security timing, and tighter coordination between accounts can change the trajectory significantly even in your late 50s and 60s. What matters is having an honest plan and acting on it, not how long you have been doing it.
How do I plan for inflation without obsessing over it?
Build a realistic inflation assumption into your projections, keep enough growth assets in the portfolio to outpace it over time, and revisit the assumption every year. You do not need to predict inflation. You need a plan that survives a range of plausible scenarios.
What if my spouse dies first? Will I be okay?
This is one of the most important questions to model, and one of the least frequently asked. It involves Social Security survivor benefits, pension survivor elections, life insurance, tax bracket changes, and how the portfolio is structured. A good plan answers it before you need the answer.
The Value of Working With Someone Who Specializes in This
Retirement planning is not the same skill as building wealth. The first half of your financial life is about accumulation. The second half is about turning what you have built into reliable income for as long as you need it, in a way that holds up to taxes, market downturns, healthcare costs, and the questions you have not thought to ask yet.
If you decide to work with someone, look for a fee-only fiduciary meaning they are paid only by you, not by commissions or product sales. Someone who specializes in retirement-stage planning, understands Oregon’s tax and estate environment, and takes the time to explain the “why” behind every recommendation. Your relationship with your advisor should lower your anxiety, not raise new questions you do not have time to research.
Moving Forward
Figuring out how much you need to retire is not really about finding a single perfect number. It is about building a plan that holds up to your real life including your health, your family, your goals, the things you cannot predict. It should give you enough confidence to stop carrying the weight of it in your head.
A good plan is a living document. It changes as you change. It accounts for the things you hope happen and prepares for the things you hope do not. And ideally, once it is in place, it lets you go back to thinking about the parts of retirement that actually matter to you: your time, your people, the life you have been working toward.
Like the thistle this firm is named after, a strong plan is built to endure: deep roots, room to bloom, and protection where it counts.
If you would like a second set of eyes on your numbers, that is exactly the kind of work we do. Thistle Wealth is a fee-only fiduciary financial planning firm based in Corvallis, Oregon, working with women and families in the years leading into retirement.
This article is for general educational purposes only and is not personalized financial, tax, legal, or investment advice. Your situation is unique and may call for different strategies than those described here. Please consult with a qualified professional who can provide guidance tailored to your specific circumstances. All investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal.
