Poor in age? How you get out of the trap
A few months ago Birgit M. (69) from Schleswig-Holstein wrote to us: "First I knitted, sewed and cooked myself out of the ChroniquesDuVasteMonde, then the children and the husband, and now I see what has remained: a pensioner with me 888 Euro pension, divorced, single, who worked as a specialist almost 30 years full time (I stayed 15 years because of the children at home) .I deserve something more because I have to repress my many desires and try to live a contented life I think there are a lot of women in this situation who are educated, interested and attentive, but are totally thwarted by their financial situation. "
Old-age poverty is not a law of nature
Yes, there are many women who are "thwarted". A mild word. The hard word is age poverty. And that, says ChroniquesDuVasteMonde financial expert Helma Sick, "is not a law of nature, but a decade-long interaction of discriminatory factors."
Of course, discrimination is no longer as extreme as it used to be: until 1922 women in Germany did not have access to the stock exchange under the Reich Stock Exchange Act - even if they owned a company. Until 1958, in the Civil Code of the clause 1363 was: "The assets of the woman is subjected by the marriage of the administration and Nutznießung of the man." Today women can work as a matter of course, earn their own money, inherit, buy real estate, open a depot.
All the more frustrating are the figures published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in November: in Germany, women only have 72 percent of the same economic opportunities as men. This puts us in 43th place out of 144 countries. "Global Gender Gap Report" is the name of the report, and when you try to unravel the reasons for this gap, the gap between the sexes, you're just stumbling from one hole to the next:
There is the Wealth gap, the difference in wealth. In 2014, a man in Germany had an average of 97,000 euros, a woman around 60,000.
The Gender Pay Gap, often quoted, still unbelievable. In 2016, a woman earned an average of 16.26 euros gross per hour, a man 20.71. Makes 21 percent difference.
The Gender Time Gap, well-known: women get children, take breaks for work, reduce their working hours. 39 percent of mothers work part-time, on average 20 hours a week.
So many gaps. All together they make up the dramatic gap in old age: the Gender Pension Gap, In the old federal states the pension of a man is almost twice as high as that of a woman. In the new federal states, the difference is far from being so dramatic, where women were almost always in full-time employment and accordingly accumulated more insurance years.
The big gap: so high is the pension
Women (old states):
618 euros / accumulated insurance years: 27.6
Men (old states):
1131 Euro / accumulated insurance years: 40.5
Women (new states):
882 Euro / accumulated insurance years: 41
Men (new states):
1116 Euro / accumulated insurance years: 44.5
Average pension payment per month; Source: Pension Insurance Report 2017
So what can we do to fill in the gaps? Rethinking - when it comes to work and money.
We have to turn our brains on
Marie-Christine Dabauvalle is French, since 1980 in Germany and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg. Of the approximately 29,000 students, more than half are female.
One of the most important insights that Professor Dabauvalle wants to give to her students has nothing to do with her subject. She is since 2006 also women's representative of the university. "I got my two children here in Germany and I would never have decided to stop working," she says. "My children were cared for, as I was in France when I was a child, and neither they nor I got any harm from it, and this fear of being a mother of a raven is absurd." Again and again, young women sit in front of her and ask her uncertainly, if and how her studies, her scientific career would be possible with a child. And Mrs. Dabauvalle then says: "It depends on your partner."
That's why she also invited Helma Sick to give a lecture at the university last year, as a kind of reasoning aid. The ChroniquesDuVasteMonde columnist has a busy diary like never before, writing the book "A Man's No Pensions" together with former Family Minister Renate Schmidt. She speaks at community colleges and women's associations, she sat with "Ms. TV" and on the red sofa at "THAT!". After 30 years of financial advice, she has a large repertoire of shattering stories.
Women end up in old-age poverty because they believe in eternal love
Helma Sick goes on to say, "If there is female old-age poverty, then there are many who think only of single parents and low-income women, but there is an ever-expanding group that is at least as vulnerable: the well-educated academics who drop out voluntarily as soon as they have children . " They will not return to their jobs soon. Or stay in part-time for a long time. And do not settle with her husband on how her loss of earnings and her pension losses are compensated. "Naive and reckless" Helma Sick calls this: "The women end up in the age poverty, because they believe in the romantic eternal love and do not turn on their brains in time!"
The Federal Family Ministry came to a similar conclusion in a study in 2015: "Addiction to dependency and existence threatens marriage for many women, especially if the man becomes incapacitated or unemployed - or if the marriage fails.
In addition, at the age of 30 to 49 years women with children, the topic of pension "apparently mentally push back," it says. It could not be due to an information deficit: After all, every year, everyone receives information about the expected pension. And a few lines further in the report is the ugly word "repression".
We have to learn to save again
It is not just women with children and interrupted careers who often can no longer maintain their standard of living when they get older. In the case of younger women, the statutory pension will later not even be half as high as their last net income: from 2030 there will only be 43 percent. Do the expenses, the demands, the wishes halve in old age? Just. Therefore: There must be more money in the cash register.
Sometimes Helma Sick advises women who say: I would like to save regularly, but there's nothing left! Then she asks: "Do you buy a coffee to go in the morning? Do you sometimes go to the bakery and get a sandwich? Yes, is there no coffee machine in your company? Can not you make a coffin at home?"
You can invest money that you do not spend
Many small expenditure not spent adds up. The problem is, once money is left, it still ends up in the wrong place all too often. According to a study by Comdirect, 54 percent of women have money in their current account, just as many on savings accounts, 34 percent have money market accounts. No risk!
Yes, these are very safe places. Unfortunately, the money there is no longer, but measured in terms of purchasing power, less: A maximum of 1 percent interest rates are simply less than 1.8 percent inflation. And yet we Germans have an incredibly large fortune, more than 2000 billion euros, designed so that it can not multiply.
For example, suppose you're missing out on one or the other coffee to go or pub night, and there are actually 100 euros left over a month. Now, if you put that into a fund savings plan with an average return of 5 percent, how much do you have after ten years? On the pages of online banks or ETF providers, such as iShares, you can calculate this immediately: 15848.14 euros. You have paid 12000 of them, the rest is your return. But you can smear steals, right?
Saving does not just mean giving up - it is an important step on the way to greater independence. More and more financial bloggers live and calculate this on the Internet. For some, saving is a matter of getting rich; for others, thrift is a variant of mindfulness and a conscious lifestyle; and some of the younger ones have the goal of not having to work at the age of 40, but of being able to live off the passive income (interest, dividends, rental income). "Hastalavista Hamsterrad" is the name of a post in one of the blogs.
We have to be smart
Another gap still exists, and it too should be closed quickly: the Bildungslücke, Last year, Union Investment consulted experts (consumer organizations, politicians, teachers, journalists and financial advisers) on their assessment of how well informed Germans are about finance. Only five percent said: good or rather good. But 19 percent considered the Germans to be inadequate or insufficiently informed.
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