For those in their 40s, navigating finances should include stressing retirement

For 48-year-old Rowan Childs of Wisconsin, a recent divorce turned her financial life upside down.

"Initially, I was really nervous and had a lot of anxiety about it, but ultimately now I feel so much more empowered," Childs told CBS News.

Like others in their 40s, Childs, who runs her own literacy nonprofit, was already anxious about juggling personal debt and putting away college tuition for her two children. She then joined the roughly half of married women around her age in the U.S. who have dealt with a divorce, a seismic event that can jeopardize retirement planning.

"That has completely changed my initial vision, you know?" Childs said. "...Where am I going to be in my 60s or my 70s or 80s?"

Childs said retirement wasn't necessarily something she thought about when she was first married.

"It was too far away, I think," Childs said. "Definitely looking at what my parents were doing, though, was definitely something that I was observing."

Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist at the New School for Social Research in New York City, has a sobering perspective.

"People who are in their 40s and 50s will do worse than their parents and their grandparents," Ghilarducci said.

Ghilarducci explains that those two previous generations could at least bank on government-sponsored retirement programs.

"Two generations, because people had grandparents that were living through an expansion of Social Security and Medicare," Ghilarducci said.

Both of those programs are now facing funding challenges, something Childs considered when she had to make a series of tough financial decisions. The costliest was to buy her ex-husband's share of their Wisconsin home by borrowing more than $100,000 from her 401(k).

It was a decision partly spurred by the desire to keep her daughter in the same school district.

"To me, it didn't make sense to sell the house and then buy a house in the same school district, probably at even more," Childs said.

Borrowing from a retirement plan, as Childs did, should be a last resort, because if you lose your job, the loan must be repaid in full or you may have to pay taxes and penalties. And if you're in your 40s, paying for a child's college should take a back seat to protecting your own savings. That may come across as tough love, but otherwise you might end up relying on your children later on.

"Jokingly, I told my kids I could move in with them," Childs said. "…My son was like, 'Well, maybe you could live close by.'"

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