I know what drives me to be like this – my past.  I remember my father always said, “Pumpkin – do you really think you need that?  Why don’t you wait for a few days?  You know, patience is a virtue.” And boy, did that ever cause me to get angry and have a temper tantrum – even when I was teenager. However, now I can truly appreciate why he always wanted me to wait and practice patience. 

I am just like everyone else – I like nice things a lot, new shoes and handbags – but this important life skill of self discipline and delayed gratification that my dad helped me with has kept me from making poor choices and piling on significant amounts of debt. Waiting to purchase those things that I truly coveted and thought I “needed” has been one of the best financial lessons I was taught at a very young age. 

So much comes to our children so easily – they rarely need to wait anymore. A lot of this has been driven by technology (instant messaging, email, music downloads, etc) and the commercialization of our society. All fosters an attitude of “you can get what you want, when you want it.”  Children, including mine, grow up thinking that instant gratification and acquisition of a want – usually a toy or some type of sweet— is the way to happiness!! 

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S-Curve Records and Diane Birch are proud to present Discover & Donate. You discover Diane Birch’s soulful debut album, “Bible Belt” ,then you choose one of six charities to receive a $1 donation from your purchase. The charities are:  SOS Children’s Villages, Autism Speaks, March of Dimes, Keep A Child Alive, Share Our Strength or Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Additionally, you can download the Discover & Donate widget to your site – wherever that might be and who ever raises the most money for charity through their widget by June 23, 2009, will win a FREE PRIVATE PERFORMANCE in the winner’s hometown!! How cool is that? Click here to start sharing.

Please do one of 2 things to support Diane Birch, her music and cause:

Download the Discover & Donate widget to your site here – and when someone clicks through that widget to buy the album, $1 to charity will be made in YOUR name and who ever raises the most $ - wins a Free Private Performance with Diane Birch.

Or just click below at the banner and BUY the CD to support one of the charities.

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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Leslie argues that most women who have quit the labor force to be full time mothers are being lulled into a false sense of complacency about relinquishing their financial autonomy – which I wholeheartedly agree with.  The media gives lots of coverage to women who quit the labor force to become full-time mothers, and treat this decision as if it were simply a lifestyle choice. The media never seems to mention the “risks of economic dependency – or the myriad benefits of work.” As a result, Leslie argues that women have been lulled into a dangerous sense of complacency about relinquishing their financial autonomy?  Why hasn’t the media or anyone else told the truth about how much these women might be sacrificing—or what the consequences could be? 

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“Here’s a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process. Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders’ contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.

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And for another great insight from William Black on how he thinks this banking crisis will lead to the end of the Obama presidency - because we “have failed bankers giving advise to failed regulators about failed assets - how can it resukt in anything BUT failure.“  So true…what was Obama thinking when he hired his financial team?  Black goes onto say that “the Democrats picked the wrong financial team.“ “Tim Geithner, the current Secretary of the Treasury, and Larry Summers, chairman of the National Economic Council, were important architects of the problems.  Geithner especially represents a failed regulator, having presided over the bailouts of major New York banks.“  “Geithner is flouting the law, in naked violation, in order to pursue the kind of favoritism that the law was designed to prevent. He has introduced the concept of capital insurance, essentially turning the U.S. taxpayer into the sucker who is going to pay for everything. He chose this path because he knew Congress would never authorize a bailout based on crony capitalism.“  He goes further to state that Geithner’s PIPP plan essentially “perpetuates zombie banks by mispricing toxic assets that were mispriced to the borrower and mispriced by the lender, and which only served the unfaithful lending agent.“

Wow, alot to take in….not sure where we are heading, but I don’t think it will be smooth sailing from here.  OK back to focus on my new exciting partnership - I cant share yet.  But I will.

So, let’s start with an overview of what has been clogging the credit markets:  the biggest problem has been the legacy (toxic) assets which are complicated parts of home mortgages - many of which have gone bad, and many more of which are likely to go bad in the near future. For simplicty, suppose a bank has $100 million (face value) of these assets on its books.  But due to the increased bad debts associated with these assets and mark to market accounting, the banks have had to mark the assets down to $80 million, and in the process have had to take huge losses (in this case $20 million). Most of the banks would like to get these assets off its books, but claim there is no market for them or in other words that there is a liquidity issue.

In reality it might not be a liquidity issue since there are people out there who might be willing to buy those assets for say $10 million. That, however, would require the bank to write-off an additional $70 million and if it did so, it would be bankrupt. However, let’s just say this bank is in the class that has been deemed “too big to fail.”  So in comes the NEW PLAN.

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First, McKinsey found that there were several pre-conditions to successful leadership:  intelligence, desire to lead, communication skills and tolerance for change.  If a person already possessed these skills, McKinsey found that successful women leaders also had five “broad and interrelated” dimensions:  meaning, framing, connecting, engaging and maintaining energy – all of which can be learned.

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I am going to the LIVE blog party in NYC next week on March 25 - please let me know if you might want to come.