Many of the 40 million older adults in the United States are struggling financially. They lack the assets to see them through their later years, when they require more health care and other services than they expected.
A new book, Financial Capability and Asset Holding in Later Life: A Life Course Perspective co-edited by Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging director Nancy Morrow-Howell, PhD, concludes that older adults require financial knowledge and access to financial services in order to build secure lives. The book uses a life course perspective to explain how financial vulnerability is created across many decades and then revealed in old age, when few opportunities exist to reverse difficult conditions.
Morrow-Howell is the Bettie Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy in the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University, director of the Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging, and faculty director of Productive Aging research at Washington University’s Center for Social Development.