The Zombieslayer

Before I get started about talking about money, just want to get two things straight:

1) Health is more important than money.  If your health is bad, it doesn’t matter how much money you have.  I’d trade money for health any day.

2) Money has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you’re a good or bad person.

There.  Now that that’s out of the way, I have to do this rant because I hear it all the time.  Men have all the money.  Women have glass ceilings.  Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

First off, pick up a copy of The Millionaire Next Door.  That book does a great job showing that just about every stereotype about millionaires is wrong.  Wealth for one thing is measured by family, NOT by men vs. women.  That said, men and women have completely different attitudes about wealth, and attitude is everything.  That book found that it’s usually the women’s accounting skills and spending habits, not how much the couple makes, that determines how wealthy the family will be.

Another thing, millionaires don’t necessarily make gobs of money.  The median income of a millionaire family is only $70,000, which for a two-income household is actually quite low for where a lot of you all live.  So it’s not necessarily how  much money you make, it’s what you do with it.
Men and women do different things with money.  I was at Barnes and Noodle earlier today looking in the Investment section, and it was 100% male.  Not ONE woman grabbed a book from that section the two hours we were there.  Two young ladies did walk by it and one said to the other “buy that millionaire woman book” to which the other one replied “if I don’t spend money, I won’t have money problems.”  That’s about the dumbest thing she could have possibly said.  $100 says she’ll be broke 10 years from now.

Gender and small talk

Of most of my acquaintances, with guys, I talk sports, music, or investing when it comes to small talk.  With women, I talk about family, movies, or t.v. shows.  Women generally don’t want to talk about investing until they reach 40.  Men start talking about it in their early 30s or even earlier.   So there you go, a decade of potential investing wasted.  That amounts to a lot of money they could have had.  Of course, men when they reach 30 wish they started investing right after college instead of spending it on stupid crap.

I’ve bought stocks before after small talk with strange guys at bars.  And I’ve given tips to strangers too.  Each time, it’s a male.

Aggressiveness

The other drawback to women and investing is aggressiveness, or lack thereof.  Several of my co-workers are close enough to show each other our 401k’s.  I know that’s about as personal as showing each other your genitals to most folks, but we do it.

Men tend to invest more aggressively.  One of the women I helped out had 100% (I’m not kidding) of her 401k in a savings mutual fund.  That’s about as stupid as you can get when it comes to investing.  Savings is a horrible thing to invest in, because even if you’re getting 4.5%, inflation is currently at 3.9%, so you’re barely beating inflation.

Stocks on the other hand over the past 100 years have averaged over 10%.  Sure they go up and down and it can drive you mad if you watch the market every day, but my advice to those who worry is to relax.  It’s all about the long-term.

Big salaries

I’ve worked with many women who made more money than I did.  One literally used to make double of what I made, and my wife didn’t work at the time.  Unfortunately for her, she never cut the umbilical chord, and to this day is still taking care of her 30+ alcoholic son.  So, so much for investing.  I would have kicked his ass out a decade earlier.  She simply won’t be able to retire at 65, which is coming up a heck of a lot sooner than she’d like to believe.

Another used to make about $40-50k more than I did.  She has a gorgeous collection of shoes and clothing, and is great to look at.  However, she owns no home and only recently paid off her credit debt.  And she wondered how with a wife and kid who don’t work, and a much lower salary, I was able to buy a house in California.

Now, those are two extreme examples, but you get my point.

That said, I do not pretend to be a Financial Consultant.  I am not.  I’m just a private investor, and I still have a day job.  So don’t be thinking I’m Warren Buffet’s son or something.  I’m just repeating what I see, for what it’s worth.

It’s changing for the better

The good thing about gender and money is it’s changing.  Writers like Suzy Orman and David Bach are getting more and more women to think about money.  That’s a good thing.  When women start taking money more seriously at an earlier age, you’ll see a heck of a lot more female millionaires.

Now, I’m not at all justifying the disparity between the genders, I’m just trying to make sense of it.  If women were as aggressive and thought about money as much as men, I guarantee you that you’ll see just as many women millionaires as men.  It doesn’t take a big brain to get rich.  It just takes patience, discipline, and hard work.  And a little bit of aggressiveness.