By Tammy La Gorce
Before Lupita Uribe married in 2020, she told her husband-to-be that a wedding wasn’t in her future unless he was OK with two promises she had made herself. One: She intended to keep living in San Francisco, where she had grown up and where she works in internal communications for Twilio, a software developer. Two: Her mother would eventually move in with her.
“I always say I’m my parents’ retirement plan,” Uribe, 29, said. As a Latina, she said, she knows that caring for aging family members is a part of her culture and is nonnegotiable. But making it happen financially, something she is working on, can come with challenges.
Last year, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that compared with every other racial, ethnic and gender group, Latinas earned the least. They are also the most likely to have no bank account and to work in lower-wage jobs without pensions or retirement savings plans, said Judy Chapa, a financial educator who helped start a two-year study, the Latina Savings Project, with Mana, an advocacy organization for Latinas, and a nonprofit group, the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement.
Because Latinas are one of the longest-living demographic groups — Hispanic American women can expect to live to 84, second only to Asian American women, at 87, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the consequences of low wages and a lack of access to workplace savings opportunities add up. The longer life expectancy becomes a mixed blessing, translating to more financial burdens in old age, the Social Security Administration has found. Overall, 42% of women who receive Social Security benefits rely on them for more than half their income, according to the administration.
A number of issues contribute to Hispanic women’s lack of collective wealth, experts said. There is a significant pay gap between them and others: They earn 57 cents on the dollar compared with white men, a bigger gap than Black and white women face.
Over a 40-year career, that gap shortchanges them by more than $1.2 million, said Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the National Women’s Law Center. That gap is exacerbated by breaks from the workforce to care for children or older relatives, she said.
In some households, traditional gender roles that can leave Latinas dependent on spouses can render them financially insecure, said Fernando Torres-Gil, director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a member of the Latino Policy & Politics Institute.
“For a lot of them, it’s still: The husband will provide a long, happy life,” he said.
Uribe’s parents emigrated from the state of Jalisco, in western Mexico, when she was 6. They divorced the year they arrived in California. Both had gone to college before immigrating, but their degrees didn’t transfer, Uribe said, and they took jobs in the service sector. Uribe’s mother worked as a private housekeeper, while her father logged years working for AAA and now owns his own roadside assistance service in Sacramento, California. While they stayed clear of debt, neither has been able to accumulate much for retirement.
Uribe said she didn’t know much about investing until she started working at Twilio.
“When I got a higher-paying job, I had the bandwidth to actually think about my future instead of my immediate needs,” she said. “I felt like I needed to be intelligent about building future wealth.”
That line of thought led her last year to Valerie Rivera, a certified financial planner and the founder of FirstGen Wealth in Chicago. Rivera knew right away that she wanted to work with Uribe.
“My clients are often the first in their families to be born in this country,” she said. “They might be the first to go to college or the first to make more money than their parents.”
Torres-Gil said he was noticing a trend in his own work.
“We’re seeing an increase in the proportion of Hispanics going on to higher education,” he said. “The majority happen to be female. And it doesn’t matter whether they’re first generation or second generation. They’re recognizing that they have to depend on themselves first, and they’re far more likely than previous cohorts to invest or have access to 401(k)s.”
Azucena Guzman, 46, is an owner of Miriam’s Flower Shop in New York City. She and her brother, who lives nearby, share responsibility for housing and financially supporting their 70-year-old mother. Guzman’s mother has some health issues, including diabetes and arthritis. She does not receive Social Security benefits because until a few years ago, she was living in the country illegally.
Guzman has no savings and doesn’t expect to be able to start putting away money for retirement any time soon. Her financial focus is instead on repaying a $28,000 government loan that kept her business from closing permanently during the worst of the pandemic. The interest rate is low, she said, but with that obligation she has trouble envisioning retirement at all. She does worry about paying for health care emergencies.
“I don’t feel as good as when I was 20,” she said. “But I need to do something for my mother and myself. That’s my concern.”
Inspired by situations like Guzman’s, Cindy Hounsell, president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement, started the Latina Savings Project in 2017. AARP helped fund the program, which offers financial education workshops and encourages moderate- and low-income Latinas to save and invest with as little as $20. The first few years of the workshops, Hounsell said, showed positive results: Three-quarters of participants offered the chance to open a savings account at a local credit union signed up. Of those, the majority saved during the six-month period after enrollment.
Uribe, for her part, said she felt well compensated for her work. She received a bonus this year that left her torn over whether to invest the money or spend it on expanding a family-owned property in Mexico that is intended for the extended clan to use. She turned to Rivera for help.
“We decided to instead invest it in the market,” Uribe said. “Since it’s at such a low, it made more sense to do that right now for long-term gains.”