I have written a lot of books about money. Most of them (like 99% of them) were written for men. That is not a complaint. It is just what the industry asked for at the time, and I was good at it. I learned the language of net worth and asset allocation and tax strategy. I sat in rooms with financial advisors and CPAs and listened to them talk about “the client” as if “the client” were always a guy in a suit who wanted to know how to make his money work harder.
And the whole time, I was watching the women.
Like the two women who were with their husbands in a class on retirement. They were timid at first, but then they got bolder, asking about how the money they had worked so hard to save wouldn’t get lost in the next stock market crash. The instructor basically didn’t answer them, because he couldn’t. Sure, he said, “There are ways to mitigate the damage,” but he didn’t explain that “mitigate” means to lessen the blow. One woman looked like she got it, even though she wasn’t too happy about it.
The other one didn’t, and I helped explain to her afterward what “mitigate” meant. She wasn’t happy either, once she understood. She didn’t want to “mitigate.” She wanted to “protect” at least half of her retirement fund. I explained that what she was really asking about was “safe money,” meaning it wasn’t going to lose anything, but it would earn better than what CD rates were offering. She liked that, and she liked the tax advantages too. I told her to ask the instructor. He was very able to help her once I helped her ask the right questions.
And how could I forget the single woman who had worked her whole life in either the armed services or the government? She had a great business idea she wanted to pursue when she retired, but she was afraid of spending the money she had set aside for the years she was no longer working. She felt completely stuck until I showed her that she could have both, the business and the retirement, without compromising either one. She has since “retired,” and her new business is really taking off.
I have been helping women a long time. I sat next to a woman on a plane going home to Denver. When I told her that I help women make better financial decisions, she was reluctant to talk to me at all, at first. “I’ve been burned by financial advisors before,” is what she said. But when I told her I was a financial consultant more interested in her story than anything else, she relaxed. And when I told her that I love helping women make their money work more effectively, based on what they want, she leaned in and whispered, “Can I ask you something?”
I have also had women who couldn’t believe that the solution I was offering was actually real. There was one retiree exactly like this. I acknowledged where she was coming from completely, and suggested she read what the Comptroller of the United States had to say. (He is the person responsible for overseeing all the money spent in the US…we are talking trillions of dollars, a figure most of us can’t truly conceive of.) She called me a few weeks later, totally shocked at what she had learned. And very pleased to know that I was still willing to help her.
I have spent more than a decade watching women navigate money in ways the financial industry was never built to see. Here is what they taught me.
Lesson One: Women Carry More Than They Let On
Most women I have talked to are doing more financial heavy lifting than anyone gives them credit for. It is the single mom who had to learn to make ends meet when her husband left. It is the woman who lost her husband before she was ready to take over the financial reins in the family.
How many of you spend too much of your free time tracking the household budget, watching the bills, calculating whether you can swing the Invisalign payment this month (the new way the dentist does braces, apparently), mentally running retirement math in the carpool line, and worrying about your aging parents all at the same time?
And almost none of you would call yourselves a “financial wizard.” But I bet you know more than you think.
The gap between what women actually do with money and what they believe they know about money is enormous. But it is NOT a knowledge gap. It is a permission gap. Which brings me to the next lesson.
Lesson Two: “I’m Not Good with Money” Is the Biggest Lie Women Tell Themselves
I have heard this sentence so many times I could write a whole book about it. (Maybe I will.)
It makes me personally seethe. (No kidding. I get really angry.) The first time I heard it was from the very first person who decided that stable money was better than volatile money (money that goes up and down with the tides of the stock market). When she said she wasn’t good with money, I immediately reminded her that she was taking care of her mother, who was a firecracker and didn’t really want the help, although she needed it more and more, AND she was handling all the family finances on her own. She knew plenty.
To every woman who has ever said, “I am not good with money,” I want to ask you something: Who has raised the families, run the households, and managed budgets through layoffs and divorces and college tuitions and elder care? You have stretched a dollar in ways no spreadsheet has ever calculated.
You have stretched a dollar in ways no spreadsheet has ever calculated. That is not “bad with money.” That is mastery.
You are extraordinarily good with money. You just have not been told you are.
What you have been told, often subtly and sometimes loudly, is that “good with money” means “fluent in Wall Street jargon.” Let me be very clear: money does not mean Wall Street. It never did.
Lesson Three: The Right Question Matters More Than the Right Answer
The most powerful conversations I have had with women about money did not start with me giving them an answer. They started with me asking a better question.
Not, “How much do you have saved?” But: “What do you want your life to look like in ten years?”
Not, “What is your risk tolerance?” But: “What would you regret not doing?”
Real financial guidance for women does not start with the numbers. It starts with life. And that is the part the industry keeps getting backward.
Women open up when the question matches the life they are actually living. We are not shut out of the conversation because we cannot do the math. We are shut out because nobody has been asking us anything worth answering.
Lesson Four: Permission, The Ingredient Nobody Talks About
I have watched women hesitate to spend money on themselves for things they desperately wanted and could absolutely afford. I have watched them defer to a husband, an adult son, or a financial advisor on decisions they were more than qualified to make on their own.
I have also watched what happens when a woman finally gives herself permission. To ask the question. To make the move. To take the trip. To say no to the thing she has been saying yes to for thirty years out of obligation.
Be like the woman I worked with who, at sixty, decided she was far from done with life, and enrolled in the hardest study program she had ever tackled. (And she has a Ph.D., so that is saying something.)
The transformation is something else. It almost never starts with more information. It starts with permission.
That is part of why Girl Power Finance exists. To hand women the permission slip they have been waiting for.
Lesson Five: Say the Quiet Parts Out Loud
This is the lesson that surprised me the most.
I went into this work thinking my job was to be the expert in the room. To have the answers, explain the spreadsheet, be the person women came to for advice.
What I learned, slowly, is that women do not just need an expert. They need a safe place to say the quiet parts out loud.
They knew how much their husband made, but they didn’t know where it was all going.
They knew that money was coming out of their retirement account every month, but they didn’t know there were far bigger tax problems waiting for them because of it.
They had a sense of how much they had accumulated, but they had NO idea how they were going to turn that money into income. And so they worried about it constantly, wondering if it would ever be enough.
You cannot fix what you cannot say. Women have been told, for a very long time, not to say the money stuff out loud. We are changing that.
What All of This Adds Up To
Eleven-plus years of writing about money and listening to women’s financial stories has taught me that the real story is not in the spreadsheets. The real story is in the lives of the women carrying those spreadsheets around in their heads at 2 AM.
It has taught me that women are not behind. They are not bad with money. They are not in over their heads. They are, mostly, brilliantly capable people who were never invited to the table they have been holding up the whole time.
And it has taught me that when you give women the right information, the right questions, and a great big permission slip, they do not just catch up.
They lead.