When I raised the issue of marital status, I wanted to get at what were the potentially vulnerable populations in terms of perhaps low income. Without getting into the discussion around what constitutes low income or what constitutes poverty, if we look at the census data from 2006 and we use the low-income cut-offs before tax--these are women who are not living with family members and are 75 years of age or older--we get a low-income rate of 28% for those women who had never married during their lives and a low-income rate of 29% before taxes of those who were widowed. For those who are 75 and over but divorced, the low-income rate was 42%. That's a difference of about 13 percentage points. If we look at the 65 to 74 age group, the low-income rates for the widowed and never married are in the range of 25% to 30%, and the rates of the divorced are in the 39% range. That's where I was coming back to for late-life changes in family formation or dissolution in this case, and the implications for financial well-being.
On October 20th, 2009. See this statement in context.