On Her Own
Women and Financial Planning Series
Not every financial planning conversation happens with a couple sitting across from us at the table.
A significant and growing portion of women navigate their financial lives on their own - whether because they’ve lost a spouse, ended a marriage, or simply never had a partner. Each of those situations is different in important ways. What they share is the absence of someone to divide the decisions with, to share the worry with, to serve as a fallback if something goes wrong.
That absence changes the financial conversation in ways worth understanding.
When a Spouse Dies
There’s a particular dynamic that plays out in some long marriages, especially in older generations. One partner - often but not always the husband - handles the finances. The other is present at meetings, broadly aware of the picture, but not deeply engaged in the details. And it works well enough while both are alive and healthy.
When the husband dies, the wife is suddenly responsible for a financial life she may only partially understand, at exactly the moment she has the least emotional capacity to learn it.
We’ve seen this situation more than once. A couple comes in, he makes clear early on that he handles the financial decisions, and the relationship develops accordingly. Then he passes - sometimes suddenly - and she’s on her own.
The right response to a situation like that isn’t to immediately flood someone with information they’re not ready to absorb. It’s to start with the practical - the death certificate, the accounts that need to be transferred, the immediate decisions that can’t wait - and let the larger picture come into focus over time. People in grief can often handle logistics better than they can handle abstract planning. The logistics give the mind something to do.
What matters is being there. Not just for the paperwork, but for the subsequent meetings when the dust has settled and the real questions begin to surface. Clients facing this often wonder if they have a partner in this. The answer, in a good financial relationship, is yes.
Divorce Is Different
Losing a spouse to death and losing a marriage to divorce are both forms of loss, but they require different kinds of support.
Death is final. The grief is acute, but the path forward is in some ways cleaner. There’s a clear before and after.
Divorce is messier. The other person is often still present in some form - through shared children, through ongoing legal and financial entanglement, through the simple fact that someone who knew everything about your life is now on the other side of a table with their own attorney. The financial unwinding can take years. The emotional processing takes longer.
What helps in these conversations is the same thing that helps in all of them: listening without agenda. A woman working through a divorce doesn’t need her financial advisor to have an opinion about the marriage. She needs someone who can help her understand what she actually has, what she’s entitled to, and what her options are - and who will stay in that role without judgment while she figures out the rest.
The financial picture after divorce often looks different than either party expected. Getting clarity on what’s actually there is the first step, and it’s one that benefits from having a trusted advisor in the room early in the process.
A Lifetime of Independence
Women who have been single throughout their lives have often developed something their partnered counterparts sometimes lack: a long track record of managing their own financial lives.
When you’ve handled everything yourself for decades, you build competence and confidence that partnership can sometimes obscure. You know where the accounts are. You know what you spend. You’ve been making your own decisions for years.
What may be less developed - through no fault of their own - is planning for the end of independence. The question of who helps when help is needed. Who serves as power of attorney when that becomes relevant. Who the trusted contact is when something goes wrong.
For a woman with a large, nearby family, these questions have obvious answers. For a woman whose family is scattered or small, the answers require more deliberate construction - identifying people who can serve in those roles, sometimes friends, sometimes professional fiduciaries, and building the legal structure around them before the need is urgent.
The legacy conversation for single women also tends to look different. Without children of their own, the question of where assets go requires more active thought. Most people, when pressed, do have clear preferences - nieces and nephews they want to help, causes they care about, friends whose wellbeing matters to them. We’ve seen clients who chose to leave a portion of their estate to fund care for a loved one with disabilities - not their own family member, but someone they’d known and cared about for years. That kind of decision doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone asked the right questions and the right plans are put in place.
The Common Thread
Whether someone is widowed, divorced, or has been on her own throughout her life, the financial planning conversation ultimately comes back to the same place.
What are you trying to protect? What are you afraid of? Who do you want to be able to count on, and who do you want to provide for? What does security look like to you?
Those questions don’t have generic answers. They have individual ones. And finding them requires the kind of relationship where someone feels safe enough to say what they actually mean - not what they think they’re supposed to say, but what’s actually keeping them up at night.
That’s the conversation worth having. And it’s never too late to start it.
Rawe Financial is a family-owned financial advisory practice in Northern Kentucky, helping individuals and families at every stage of their financial journey. Whatever your situation, we’d welcome a conversation.