When Kitt Turner, 60, became a grandmother three years ago, she started thinking about how she could help her grandson get a solid financial start in life. As soon as he’s old enough to understand financial concepts, she plans to give him a piggy bank with separate slots for saving, investing, giving and spending. “I don’t think I did anything about educating my children about money,” she says, although she thinks they absorbed lessons in frugality from experiencing the recession firsthand. With her grandson, she’s had more time to think about the financial lessons she wants to impart.

As for her own money, Turner, a bankruptcy attorney in Philadelphia, is also carefully budgeting and saving so she can afford retirement. “When you’re 60, your biggest concern is, ‘Have I saved enough money?’” she says. In retrospect, she wishes she had saved a higher percentage of her income starting at an earlier age.

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Eric Meermann, a certified financial planner with Palisades Hudson Financial Group and contributor to the new book, “Looking Ahead: Life, Family, Wealth and Business After 55,” says that’s a common question among older adults. “The younger clients tend to be more focused on issues related to purchasing a new home or getting life insurance; the older group is more concerned about, ‘How will I make my money last throughout my retirement?’ That’s the No. 1 question,” he says.

Your 20s and 30s are the “accumulation phase” of wealth, Meermann says. Once people hit age 55 or so, they have already reached or passed their peak earning years, and are at the stage of making sure the wealth they've managed to accumulate can fund their remaining years, he adds.

“There are only a few basic things you can do: Make more money, spend less money or try to achieve higher rates of return on the assets you already have,” Meermann says. Out of those options, the middle one is the best place to start.

“People don’t really have a great understanding of their living expenses,” Meermann says, adding that tracking your spending and seeing what you can adjust is a good starting place. In terms of earning higher returns, he often finds himself counseling clients to be more aggressive with their investments, shifting more into stocks and equities and out of certificates of deposit and cash, so their money continues earning a return throughout their retirement years.

Another area of concern for older clients tends to be estate planning, particularly regarding who will inherit any wealth they leave behind. Meermann suggests setting up a 529 college savings account for grandchildren. That way, the money will go toward education expenses, even if you are not around to watch it being spent. He also encourages people to donate to charities through gifts of stock or mutual funds, which allows you to take a tax deduction without paying taxes on the gains.

Cognitive decline, a well-documented challenge for older adults in their 60s and beyond, is another concern, and one that a new paper suggests can be countered with accumulated wisdom when it comes to financial matters. In other words, handling your money wisely in your 20s, 30s and 40s can make it easier to make smarter decisions as you get older, too.

Eric Johnson, co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January and business professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, says that while older adults face some memory challenges (and often take longer to process information), they also have years of accumulated wisdom at their disposal. Knowledge, Johnson says, counteracts cognitive decline .

Older adults also tend to have more patience, which can be useful when it comes to financial management. When the researchers in Johnson's study asked​ adults questions about credit cards and selecting health insurance plans, they found that older people could better answer those questions because of their background knowledge and experience .

Still, Johnson adds, at a certain point cognitive decline is hard to avoid, even with the countervailing effects of wisdom. “If the research says anything, it says think about financial decisions when you get the money. Don’t wait until your capabilities are less than they are now,” Johnson says. If you wait to start actively managing money until your 70s or 80s, you might not have very much left to manage.

Turner says that if she can keep working for another six years, she’ll be able to delay collecting Social Security until she reaches age 66, her full retirement age. Then, she might consider working part time or volunteering. “That depends on the economy,” she says.

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