Investing for Today’s Woman
By Caroline Wetzel, CFP®, CDFA®, AWMA®
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ho is today’s woman, and why is investing so important for her well-being? Today’s woman is a competent, perpetual decision-maker. She continuously makes priority calls around how to spend her limited time and energy on the relationships and activities that enable her to live her life with intention, on her terms. Today’s woman has a strategic, long-term mindset. She realizes women live longer than ever before in history and she is experiencing this reality first-hand. At the same time today’s woman is tending to her own needs, she often finds herself providing financial and/or caretaker assistance to children, aging parents, and other loved ones. COVID-19 has intensified existing demands on today’s woman. Lockdowns required today’s woman to take on a greater proportion of existing household duties and assume new responsibilities, like homeschooling and coordinating care for loved ones from a distance. These expanded roles often have not been in place of, but in addition to, ongoing professional responsibilities that today’s woman already was balancing in new ways during the crisis. Thousands of today’s women ventured outside of their homes during the global pandemic because they were “essential”; they comprise 70% of all health and socialservices professionals. The valiant heroes who worked on the front lines during these most difficult times and those who worked from home earned, on average, between 79 cents and 82 cents for every dollar that men earned. And, as our communities
emerge from this crisis, cautiously reengage, and establish (re)new(ed) routines, many of today’s women are continuing to juggle their COVID-19 expanded set of responsibilities while charting their new paths forward. Today’s woman sees all of this and is making new choices. More than half of college students are today’s women, driven to learn skills that they can use to earn incomes that can support them in realizing a quality of life for themselves and those important to them. And in 4 out of 10 households with children under 18, women have become the primary or sole income earner. And these decisions are yielding results and new financial ways forward for today’s women. Already today’s women control approximately $11 trillion in investable assets, with many of today’s women owning day-to-day financial decisions like budgeting and bill paying. Interestingly, while many of today’s women are owning their immediate financial opportunities, fewer of them are owning their wealth over the long term. Among heterosexual married women, for instance, 58% of women defer all longterm investing, insurance, and financial planning decisions to their spouse and only 19% share in these decisions. These statistics do not change dramatically when women hold advanced degrees (46% defer decision making to spouses) or if women work in specific industries (60% of women in technology defer decision making to their spouses).
Today’s woman does not need to burden herself with even more responsibilities, managing all of the details of her immediate and long-term finances on her own. It can make a lot of sense for today’s woman to divide up financial responsibilities with others. From trusting her spouse to manage some family financial decisions to engaging a Certified Financial PlannerTM to develop her financial plan and manage her investments, today’s woman has many different people available to her to support her with her finances so she can focus on life’s other priorities. What is essential is that when today’s woman trusts others to work on her finances for her, she has them work on her finances “with” her. For her own well-being, today’s woman seeks clarity on the pieces of her financial picture, how they work together for her, and how she can change them if she needs to adjust them as life changes. Because the truth of the matter is that life will change for today’s woman; it’s not a matter of “if”, but “when” and “how”. More couples than ever are choosing to end their decades-long marriages once they become empty nesters and their children become independent in a trend called “graying divorce”. Nearly 80% of all women are ending up solely responsible for their financial well-being at some point in their lives, due to decisions to live independently, due to divorce, or due to death and outliving their life partners.
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