KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Mary Duncan never imagined how quickly she would need to learn how to manage savings and investments until a year ago.

Her husband, Fred, a bank executive, handled those chores for more than 53 years while Mary, now 73, kept a warm and loving Kansas City, Kan., home for him and their four now-grown children. When cancer claimed Fred in June 2005, decisions about what to do with their savings and his life insurance money became hers to make.

Her first reaction — a good one, according to many financial services authorities — was to do nothing.

"It was just too soon, and I was scared to commit," Duncan said this spring.

But now Duncan feels it is time to begin taking control.

Duncan was concerned that even though she is relatively debt-free, the not-quite $2,200-a-month income coming primarily from Social Security, her $109,000 investment portfolio and her older son, who lives with her and pays $500 a month to help with household expenses, simply wasn't going far enough.

Duncan told Ann Case, a certified financial planner in Excelsior Springs, Mo., that she even was wondering whether to apply for a reverse mortgage on the family home of 43 years if maintenance costs and other expenses continued to climb. In a perfect world, there would even be a little money left over to fix up and heat a backyard swimming pool that was ground zero for years of fondly remembered family barbecues.

"My finances look good on paper," she told Case. "Why do I feel so cramped?"

That is a question that many recently widowed women ask, a number of financial-services industry studies suggest.

Nearly half report they are just getting by financially a year or two after their husbands' deaths, reports the nonprofit Women's Institute for Financial Education in San Diego.

As many as 80 percent have little significant experience handling finances other than a household budget, even if they've worked outside the home, the Bond Market Foundation estimates.

In a recent Merrill Lynch survey, nearly half the women, versus about 30 percent of the men, describe themselves as being not knowledgeable about investing. And about 33 percent of women who invest, compared with 22 percent of men, told the National Center for Women and Retirement Research in a study that they often avoid making financial decisions because they fear making a mistake.

Postponing major financial decisions isn't always a bad thing. Case and other financial planners often recommend that recently bereaved persons do exactly that for a year or however long it takes to begin adjusting to the loss of a loved one.

"You will know when it is time to begin dealing with these things again," she told Duncan.

Also, Duncan already was managing her money carefully even as she wondered how adequately she was doing that, Case found after analyzing Duncan's income and spending patterns.

"The good thing is that you have a positive cash flow," Case told Duncan.

Duncan's income from Social Security, the investments and other sources comes to a little less than $2,200 a month. Her expenses run just below $1,400.

"I like shopping at the Salvation Army," she quips.

Duncan said her own first efforts to begin managing her finances more actively were discouraging. No one at the bank where she bought a conservatively invested five-star fixed-income mutual fund with the proceeds of her husband's life insurance policies ever seemed to return phone calls. There, she didn't know whom to ask about other possible investment choices.

The good news, however, is that the lapse caused little damage. The fund generally has outperformed its closest-matching market indexes since Duncan invested a year ago. That performance has been slipping since January, however, as rising interest rates cut into the prices of the underlying bonds in the fund.

The simplest solution to that problem is to diversify the portfolio and divide the money among a manageable number of other stock and bond funds offered by the same investment company that manages the fund in which Duncan has everything invested now, Case said.

"You've got everything in one fund now. That's too much," she told Duncan.

The two plan to meet again to work out more-detailed plans to find an investment mix that better matches Duncan's longer-term requirements.