Key Takeaways for Couples Without Children Planning Retirement

Consider a flexible withdrawal strategy.

Align your portfolio with your goals.

Make a long-term-care and estate plan.

Plan ahead for aging in place.

Consider working with a financial advisor.

Valentina Djeljosevic: Hi, I’m Valentina Djeljosevic with Morningstar. Welcome to Retirement Planning for Real Life. In today’s episode, we’ll talk about couples who don’t have children, and how they might plan for retirement differently. Christine Benz will tell us about the key issues to keep in mind, like long-term care, estate planning, and deciding who will help manage your affairs later in life. Christine is Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning. She’s also the co-host of The Long View podcast and author of How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful and Wealthy Retirement.

Nice to see you, Christine.

Christine Benz: Good to see you too, Valentina.

Growing Rate of Adults Without Children

Djeljosevic: Let’s start with demographics. The percentage of adults who don’t have children is growing, right?

Benz: Yes, that’s right. The fertility rate in the US hit an all-time low in 2024. Roughly one-third of adults in the US do not have children. About half of people who are under age 50 say they never intend to have children. Of course, there are a lot of factors playing into this. Some of this is very much by choice. People decide that they don’t wish to have children. In some cases, it may be that someone wanted to have children and was not able to do so, or maybe they just never met the right person to have children with. It’s important to approach the topic with sensitivity and acknowledge that not everyone who does not have children does not have them by choice, but some certainly do.

Djeljosevic: Yeah. I like that perspective. Some people have kids, some people don’t have kids.

Benz: Exactly.

Djeljosevic: For people who do have kids, it’s pretty indisputable that it’s very expensive.

Benz: Yes.

Djeljosevic: So, it seems like everything about retirement for people who don’t have kids should be a piece of cake, right? But is it?

Benz: Yes. A lot of it is so much easier. It starts with income coming into the household. Couples who do not have children do tend to have female partners who have higher educational attainment than couples with children, and so the female partner tends to bring that higher income into the household. That helps in large household income. When you have children, you often have to pay for childcare, and that’s something that you can take out of the equation, obviously, for people without children. Two incomes working longer are a very powerful tailwind for couples without children.

Of course, on the spending side of the ledger, kids are expensive, as you know, Valentina. There’s a group that typically tallies the cost of raising children from age zero to age 18, and the most recent figure was $233,000. That’s a big number. A big percentage of that is childcare, where costs are not getting any better for families. Of course, the cost of college keeps creeping up as well. That’s another thing that hangs over the retirement plans for many couples who have children. They want to simultaneously save for their own retirements, but they also have this motivation to save for their kids’ college. That’s something that is not present for people without kids. They’re not worrying about those things.

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