11/30/2014 – Retirement is a struggle for gays and lesbians; bias can be financially costly (The Washington Post)

For Kathy Murphy, the difference between being gay or straight is $583 a month. Retirement should have been a “slam dunk,” the 62-year-old Texas widow says. She saved and bought a house with her spouse, and she has a pension through her employer. But Murphy’s golden years have not been as secure as they should have been. She is missing out on thousands of dollars a year in Social Security benefits simply because she was married to a woman, not a man.

Same-sex couples in general are likely to have saved far less for retirement than their straight counterparts, according to an exclusive analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The center is jointly operated by the AP and NORC, a leading social research center at the University of Chicago. The median retirement savings for a same-sex couple is about $66,000, while straight married couples have about $88,000, according to the data, which look at the finances of straight and same-sex couples ages 19 to 95, dating to 2001.

Read the full article at The Washington Post.