Seebach: Heinz Kerry eager to help women plan for the future

Published October 14, 2006 at midnight

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I have to confess I did not expect to be charmed by Teresa Heinz Kerry, who was one of the featured speakers at the annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, held in Pittsburgh last month. But I was.

She was invited not as the wife of a presidential candidate (a fact she barely mentioned) but in her role as chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies, which she took on after her husband, U.S. Sen. John Heinz, died in a plane crash in 1991.

Talking to a roomful of editorial writers, she said, was like being at "every edit board meeting I've ever had all at once." And when she was growing up in Mozambique, when it was a Portuguese colonial dictatorship, there were no editorial writers, or if there were, "they were scratching out their dissents on their prison walls."

People became afraid, she said, and her husband (Heinz, not Kerry) taught her differently. Heinz said, "I married a nice meek woman, and I've created a monster," Heinz Kerry recalled, her expression making clear that she knew it was meant as a compliment.

She talked about Pittsburgh, and how it has changed from "hell with the lid off" in its steelmaking heyday to today's revitalized city with a strong record in building green - a revitalization due, in no small measure, to the Heinz philanthropies.

But she and the philanthropies focus on a number of other issues, one of them, women's health and economic security, of particular interest to me as I approach retirement.

She told the audience that at a conference on women's issues she organized in Boston, she asked then-Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun to give the opening remarks. At the time, the limitations on how much you could contribute to a particular retirement plan were $2,000 for workers, but only $250 for their spouses, who were, naturally, disproportionately wives rather than husbands. Moseley- Braun hadn't known that, Heinz Kerry said, and when she went back to Washington, "within two weeks Senate Finance (Committee) fixed it, without a 'no' vote."

To help women learn more about financial matters, she started Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (at www.wiser.heinz.org/portal) which offers a wealth of useful information, especially for women who believe - as 60 percent of women do, according to a recent survey by the Society of Actuaries - that they'll use up all their savings during retirement.

Actuaries get into this because what actuaries do is analyze risks, especially long-term risks. Their study, conducted in 2005, is the third in an ongoing series to find out what Americans know about the risks of retirement and how their knowledge affects how they manage their finances.

Women are more at risk than men for a number of reasons. They live longer; life expectancy at 65 is 20 years for women and 17 for men. In addition, because women are commonly younger than their husbands, they are more likely to outlive their husbands; among those over 85, 45 percent of men are single and 86 percent of women. During their working lifetimes, they earn less and work fewer years; for those retiring in 2000, women had worked on average 32 years, and men 44 years.

All that adds up to less money available for retirement and more years to stretch it over.

The report, which came out in August, has a very useful section on Social Security, pointing out that putting off the time at which a husband first claims benefits means not only a larger monthly benefit for him, but a larger spouse benefit while he is alive and a larger widow's benefit after he dies. With 40 percent of elderly women who live alone receiving more than 90 percent of their income from Social Security, that is something more people should know.

The survey asked men and women, half of them retired and half not, about various strategies they were using to protect themselves as they grew older. The percentages are not particularly significant, though I thought it was interesting that among those not yet retired, more women (55 percent) than men (45 percent) had invested in stocks or mutual funds, while among retired people it was the other way around. In fact, investing was the most common strategy mentioned by women, just ahead of cutting back on spending.

But it's a useful checklist. The other strategies are buying insurance to supplement Medicare, or participating in an employer's health plan for retirees, paying off the mortgage, eliminating consumer debt, trying to save as much as possible, moving your assets to more conservative investments as you get older, buying a plan that will provide lifetime guaranteed income, or buying insurance for long-term care.

I didn't do the final one, and now I can't. And some don't apply. But save as much as possible? My parents taught me that.

Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the News. She can be reached by telephone at (303) 954-2519 or by e-mail at seebach@RockyMountainNews.com.

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