Nursing students need a myriad of skills to commence or advance their academic career. One topic seldom required in a curriculum is financial planning for retirement. Given the retirement financial challenges that many nurses face, often because of too late and/or inadequate retirement savings, our leadership and management faculty members in the baccalaureate nursing program felt that they taught the ideal course in which to add class content related to retirement financial planning. We thought that early retirement financial planning specifically linked to students' professional education had the potential to establish lifelong habits and a financially secure retirement.
The US Department of Labor highlights 5 reasons why women need to save for retirement. Of the 60 million women with wages and salaries working in the United States as of March 2005, just 47% participated in a retirement plan. Women are more likely to work in part-time jobs that do not qualify for a retirement plan. Working women are more likely than men to interrupt their careers to take care of family members; therefore, they work for fewer years and contribute less toward their retirement. On average, a woman retiring at the age of 65 years can expect to live for another 20 years, 3 years longer than that of a man retiring at the same age. Finally, women tend to invest more conservatively than men do and receive lower rates of return from their investments over time.1
A secure financial retirement depends on 3 factors: a social security benefit for a retired worker, an employer-sponsored pension, and a 401K individual retirement savings plan. To maintain a retirement lifestyle similar to the preretirement lifestyle, experts estimate that employees need have at least 60% to 80% of their preretirement income. Unfortunately, 57% of today's seniors2 have assets less than $5,000.
These economic facts motivated the faculty in our senior-year leadership and management course to provide students with retirement planning information as they started their nursing education or were returning to school to advance their nursing careers. The career and retirement life lessons were included in the fifth module of a senior online seminar course, Beyond the Professional Career to Retirement, which is a corequisite with the student's leadership and management course. In this module, students develop an integrative life plan based on group and individual study.
Required Assignments
To complete module 5, the focus of this article, students are divided into small groups to discuss and complete online assignments. There are 2 required assignments related to retirement planning. First, the students are asked as follows: "Am I prepared for retirement?" To illustrate their knowledge level, students are then referred to a glossary of retirement-related terms. Most students have never heard of a defined contribution retirement plan (401K), ROTH Independent Retirement Account, and vesting. They become familiar with the language by making an appointment with their employer's human resource department. This is done before completing a personalized retirement worksheet that includes a forecast of annual expenses and retirement income based on a retirement calculator, http://finance.yahoo.com/calculator/retirement/ret-02. For the younger students (many of whom are in their 20s) who may not have had a job as a nurse, they can do the retirement plan using their parent's situation if possible. Many of the students who choose this option are shocked to find that their parents are often ill equipped financially to retire and, in fact, may have to be dependent on their children for financial support.
The second activity to highlight course content is having students work as a group with a case study to determine if the individual can retire at 59.5, 62, or 65 years of age. The case study provides a real-life scenario that is directly applicable to their own retirement planning. Even the young nursing students find it helpful. Students are provided a list of helpful resources for this assignment (Figure 1).
Student Comments
Student comments about completing the retirement module have been overwhelmingly positive, even from those who had never even thought of saving for retirement. Students thank the faculty for "forcing" them to look into their future. The benefits of the readings, group discussion, and exercises are best reflected in students' comments: "this was a real eye-opener for me"; "my parents are approaching retirement, and my dad has spoken to me about IRAs and things before, but I really haven't paid much attention"; "looking at my potential retirement picture was not my idea of a fun assignment[horizontal ellipsis] but as it turns out, it was in my best interest to become more aware of my financial status[horizontal ellipsis] we as nurses are frequently givers and sometimes we don't think to protect ourselves"; "oh my gosh, I am 55 years old, just starting my career as a nurse. I have not saved anything for my retirement. How can I ever catch up?"
Conclusion
As we look at all the skills and knowledge that nursing students need to commence or advance their academic career, it is essential to gain financial knowledge. Although faculty members are reluctant to add "superfluous" content to already content-laden curricula, we felt an obligation in today's economy to better prepare students for a financially successful nursing career.
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