Investing for Today’s Woman
By Caroline Wetzel, CFP®
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 en- able 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 fi rst-hand. At the same time today’s woman is tending to her own needs, she often fi nds herself providing fi nancial and/or caretaker assistance to chil- dren, aging parents, and other loved ones.
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COVID-19 has intensifi ed 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 home- schooling and coordinating care for loved ones from a distance. These expanded roles often have not been in place of, but in addi- tion 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 social- services professionals. The valiant heroes who worked on the front lines during these most diffi cult 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
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emerge from this crisis, cautiously re- engage, 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 fi nancial 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 fi nancial deci- sions like budgeting and bill paying.
Interestingly, while many of today’s
women are owning their immediate fi nancial opportunities, fewer of them are owning their wealth over the long term. Among heterosexual married women, for instance, 58% of women defer all long- term investing, insurance, and fi nancial 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 specifi c industries (60% of women in technology defer decision making to their spouses).
Today’s woman does not need to burden herself with even more responsi- bilities, managing all of the details of her immediate and long-term fi nances on her own. It can make a lot of sense for today’s woman to divide up fi nancial responsibili- ties with others. From trusting her spouse to manage some family fi nancial decisions to engaging a Certifi ed Financial PlannerTM to develop her fi nancial plan and manage her investments, today’s woman has many different people available to her to support her with her fi nances so she can focus on life’s other priorities.
What is essential is that when today’s
woman trusts others to work on her fi nanc- es for her, she has them work on her fi - nances “with” her. For her own well-being, today’s woman seeks clarity on the pieces of her fi nancial 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 choos- ing 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 fi nancial well-being at some point in their lives, due to decisions to live inde- pendently, due to divorce, or due to death and outliving their life partners.
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