I've been traveling lately and receiving wake-up calls in hotel rooms for the past couple of weeks. However, I received a truly eye-opening financial wake-up call while reading the paper on the way back home.

In his weekly San Francisco Chronicle column, Moneybag, Arthur M. Louis responded to a reader who is close to retirement with "only" $100,000 in savings and wondering how to afford retired life. Louis' answer leapt off the page and smacked me upside the head.

Someone pointed out that many imminent retirees have saved considerably less than $100,000. Alas, that is true, and I'm afraid that unless they work for the rest of their lives they are going to have an impossible time making ends meet.

Advice? You're not going to like it, but perhaps the best thing you can do to enhance your finances is to move out of the Bay Area. The cost of living is ridiculously high here, most significantly the cost of housing. If you own a home, you probably can use your equity to buy a nicer one for much less in another part of the country. If you rent, you may be able to do so elsewhere at a fraction of the cost.

Let's just say that given my age, chosen place of residence and career and financial choices and realities, I'm at the losing end of the calculation described above. Frankly, if $100,000 is a mere pittance, I'm toast and so are most of the women I know. And I don't have children - retirement plus raising kids and saving for college?! I cannot even imagine.

Purely anecdotally - the only women I know that are even potentially in good shape to retire are either married to men (all engineers) with high-paying jobs or have inherited wealth. Of my circle of friends and family, I don't know any women who could retire on their earnings and savings alone no matter how well educated, high powered and well paid they are. So, I'm still looking for that member of congress with great health benefits and a fat pension to marry. But in the meantime I need a Plan B. ;-)

As a dear friend pointed out to me recently, once you hit 40 you are just as close to 60 as you are to 20. Tempting though it may be to ignore the future and re-live the glory days, once retirement is closer to your reality than your bar hopping days, ignorance can no longer be an option. And, sadly, once you can no longer ignore the reality, it is probably well past the point when you should have started paying attention.

So what is a gal who has no intention of leaving the Bay Area hometown she's finally made her way back to, nor any intention of trading in her hard won entrepreneurial independence for a cubicle ever again, to do? Well, for one, start investigating some of the resources available specifically for women to help with financial education.

If you are taking the first steps towards getting your finances under control, moneypants might be a worthwhile site to add to your research. Moneypants is designed to be "the easy way to budget, track your goals, see your progress, [and] reach your dreams." The site was started by

Three women, crazy different from each other.

Between us, we own and we rent, we have new cars and beat-up old ones, we have children and pets, good credit and not-so-good, some debt and a few assets, and lots and lots of dreams.

Membership in moneypants is $9.95 per month which gives you access to their community and their tools. It may seem odd to spend money to save money, but if for the cost of a couple of Starbuck's lattes you get the women-helping-women kick-in-the-butt that gets you on track to achieving your goals and realizing your dreams, then I'd say it's probably money well spent.

Another not free but worth it if it works for you resource is women & co. I offer women & co. with some caveats - it is a Citigroup company so be aware that it comes from a company that is likely to be *very* interested in selling you some of their financial products and the cost is $125 per year. That said, women & co. has been around for several years and is run by women to specifically address issues and concerns in financial planning for women. Some of the issues highlighted on their site include the greater likelihood of women outliving their retirement benefits and the much larger percentage of time women vs. men spend out of the workforce for to care for children or elderly parents. They offer a wide range of education and planning tools that can help make figuring all this stuff out a bit less intimidating and perhaps feel more manageable and doable.

My next order of personal financial education is to finally read Minding Her Own Business: The Self-Employed Woman's Essential Guide to Taxes and Financial Records by Jan Zobel. I've seen this book highly recommended by many a self employed person, most of them men who were able to get past the gender specific title!

After that, I'm going to keep reading, researching, educating myself and taking action so that hopefully I won't have to either work myself to death, literally or have to take Mr. Louis' advice and leave the Bay Area.

Have you received a financial wake-up call and, if so, how did you answer it?