The shelf · Ageing alone
Does Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers hold up?
Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers: A Retirement and Aging Roadmap for Single and Childless Adults, by Sara Zeff Geber (2018)
A planning guide on housing, relationships, legal arrangements and money for people ageing without children or a partner.
The short answer
A useful guide with one figure badly wrong: about a third of older American women live alone, not almost half.
The claims, checked
Almost a fifth of US baby boomers have no children.
Holds with conditions No record measures exactly that group. The nearest, Census data on women aged 45–50, shows 16.7% childless in 2014 and 14.9% in 2024: women only, and a later generation.
Evidence: US Census Bureau, 2025
Almost half of American women over 65 live alone.
Does not hold 33% of women aged 65 and over lived alone in 2023. Only among women aged 75 and over does it approach half, at 42%.