Are You Responsible For Your Financial Life?
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
When my friend Jacki and I meet – which is quite often, we always invariably leave with this burning question: why are women less likely to take responsibility for their financial wellbeing? The question came up again because I ran across a statistic that states:
Only 15% of married women feel responsible for their financial lives, planning, or retirement.
Source: The National Center for Women and Retirement Research
One of my friends thinks that maybe it has to do with women’s relationship with perfectionism, how we hate to appear inadequate or ignorant on any front. When she was going through the process of buying her first apartment, she despised how frequently she didn’t know terminology or ended up feeling intimidated by all the ins and outs (especially in the New York market). “Most of the time,“ she explained, “I feel pretty competent, so not knowing what the heck I was doing was a feeling I really hated.“ I wonder if some women avoid taking those first difficult steps to understand finances because it simply makes them feel dumb.
Another one of my friends in her early 40s, a mother of two, very well-educated, involved in part-time work, expressed that she had absolutely no interest handling the finances whatsoever. But of course she wants her daughter to be financially savvy, yet she’s unwilling to model these behaviors.
Which leads me to another possible explanation: socialization. Women are raised to think that Prince Charming will show up on his white horse to take care of them. In addition, their parents model the behaviors—too often fathers take care of all the finances while mothers stay unaware. The more that mothers abdicate financial responsibilities, the more they teach their daughters that finances are truly a man’s world.
And finally, are women just too busy? So many of us are responsible, not only for keeping track of the house and the children, their schedules, needs etc., but also our own careers and dreams. As a result, we sometimes leave the finances up to our husbands; we’re just too overwhelmed.
It’s all about choices. How are we deciding what tops the priority list? In what ways do we let others dictate what we value and focus on? Regardless of how busy we all are, and how many different directions we feel we are being pulled in, this should be one of our top priorities.
Think of it this way. If your husband was to take your children to the doctor for a health check-up and get immunized pre-kindergarten, would you follow up or assume that he handled everything just as you would, no reason to discuss? You would be hard pressed to find a woman who wouldn’t try to get as much information as she could about the appointment and her child’s wellbeing.
Believe it or not, your financial wellbeing is no less important. We cannot assume that someone else will take care of it for us or even make the same decisions we might have had we been informed.
It’s becoming thing of the past (women waiting for Prince Charming) as more and more women take care of their finances and there plenty of women who trade on the stock markets and even use derivatives like cfds and financial spread betting.
Posted by Financial Spread Betting on 11/14 at 08:13 AM