Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds the following: Approximately 28 percent of non-retired adults have no defined benefit plan or retirement savings, according to 2023 data from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 2023, approximately one-third of the private sector workforce did not have access to a retirement plan at the workplace, and only half of the workforce actually participated in a retirement plan. Women’s retirement preparedness often lags significantly behind their male counterparts', resulting in the median income for women aged 65 and older in 2022 being just 83 percent of the median income of men aged 65 and older, including income from social security, pension plans, investments, and earnings.
Women aged 80 and older had the highest poverty rate among older persons in all age groups, with 14.7 percent of women aged 80 and older living in poverty while 10.3 percent of men in the same age group live in poverty. Women make up two-thirds of low-wage workers, even though they comprise less than half of all workers, and low-wage workers are less likely than other workers to participate in a retirement plan at work. Because of the pay gap, women working full-time, year-round typically lose $398,160 over a 40-year career thereby requiring the average woman to work almost a decade longer than her male counterpart to make up that career wage gap.
Due to the lower lifetime wages stemming from unequal pay and caregiving duties, the average Social Security benefit in 2023 for a woman was $1,638 a month, while for men such average monthly benefit was $2,020. While the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 ( Public Law 117–328 ) goes a long way to address this coverage gap, just 1 in 5 part-time workers who work a full year are eligible for a retirement plan, and women are almost twice as likely to work part-time as men. While traditional defined benefit retirement plans have spousal protections, defined contribution retirement plans, which have become increasingly common, currently provide no similar spousal protections.
The Thrift Savings Plan of the Federal Government, the largest defined contribution plan in the world with approximately 6,500,000 participants, requires its married participants to have their spouses' consent for withdrawals and loans. There were almost 990,000 divorces in the United States between 2020 and 2021. After the family home, retirement savings tends to be the largest asset to be divided in a divorce. While fees and expenses associated with retirement plans have been in decline, participants have seen direct charges for processing qualified domestic relations orders increase significantly.
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Sec. 2
Findings
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