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.

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