How Women Can Achieve Financial Empowerment - and a Better Retirement

The retirement years can be -- ideally -- among the happiest years of a married couple's lives.

The sad reality, of course, is that ultimately one will be living without the other. Most often, it's the women who end up alone. Women generally outlive men and are more than three times as likely as men to lose their spouse. One report showed just how dramatic this is. About 75% of men ages 65 to 74 are married, compared with 58% of women in that age span. When they reach ages 75 to 84, that percentage for men remains the same, but it drops to 42% for women. And almost 60% of men over 85 are still married, but just 17% of women are.

Then there's this sobering reality: Most of over 3,000 respondents found that just 14% of widows were making financial decisions on their own before their husbands died.