Girls just want to have funds, to paraphrase the Cyndi Lauper tune.
Cary Carbonaro, a certified financial planner and the author of the new book “Women and Wealth,” knows all about that.
Her decades of being a sherpa for women in the male-dominated financial services field serves as the backdrop for this book, which is aimed at teaching her colleagues about the psychology behind women’s financial mojo and the best ways to attract and retain female clients.
It’s also flush with insights and strategies for individual women working to take control of their money lives.
I know firsthand what it’s like to sit in front of a male financial adviser who only directed his attention to my husband, leaving me feeling dismissed and unheard. We fired him.
Carbonaro’s mission is to help women and their financial advisers align so that doesn’t happen to others. I asked her to share some of her strategic insights. Below are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Read more: 5 barriers women face to saving money and how to overcome them
Kerry Hannon: Women and financial advisers have had a long history of not getting each other. Is that why you wrote this book?
Cary Carbonaro: The next wave of growth in wealth management is women. That was the basis for writing this book. The industry hasn’t done anything for the upcoming wealth shift. Thanks to their longer life expectancies, women will inherit wealth, both from baby boomer parents and spouses. In five years, women are expected to control a significant portion of the trillions in financial wealth that will be transferred. The timing is now.
What are the challenges that women face?
The wage gap with their male counterparts. Longevity — women live longer than men. We spend more money in retirement on healthcare than men. We’ve got a confidence gap related to managing money. We have time out of the workforce for caregiving. Finally, in general, women are more conservative than men when it comes to investing.
You write that women set themselves up for failure when managing money. In what way?
In my experience, women are emotionally tied to money. Feelings and emotions get wrapped around money with women more than men. They get attached to all kinds of things, houses, and stocks. There’s an emotional tie to it where they sometimes can’t make a clear decision because their feelings are involved. Guys don’t have that issue as much.
How can financial advisers better serve women?
They can work on better communication. Women want to be spoken to in a language that’s comfortable to them. The industry is all about male terms. Male advisers talk about beating the S&P 500 and use sports analogies.
That doesn’t resonate with many women. Women don’t care about beating the S&P 500. Women care about, am I going to be okay? Am I going to run out of money? Are my children going to be okay? Am I going to be a bag lady? Can I go on this vacation? Can I buy a second house? Women want to tie money to life events.
I’m not dumbing it down at all for women. I’m just telling them I’m putting it in life goals rather than dollars and cents and jargon. Totally different.
You also see a role for financial advisers to help women with career building. How so?
I help my female clients in negotiating for themselves as they ask for raises and salaries when they’re going for jobs. I coach all of them on that because it’s part of wealth-building.
Why aren’t there more women advisers?
Women make up only about a quarter of all certified professional advisers, CFPs, or 24,546 out of a total of 103,093.
It is so hard to get women involved. Younger women don’t think of it as a career path. Once we do bring them in, it’s hard for them to stay. They get burned out. Out of those 23%, very few of those women are rainmakers. There is still cultural bias about women not being as sophisticated about money even as advisers.
Read more: What is a financial adviser, and what do they do?
More women are the breadwinners in their homes these days. How does this impact their financial outlook?
What’s super exciting about this is that the numbers of women breadwinners have been moving up. By 2030, women are finally going to be majority breadwinners in the United States for the first time in history. Mind-blowing, right?
The challenge is having a spouse supporting them. You really need to have a very strong spouse who is OK with you making more money, and who is going to take a secondary role to help with the children and the caregiving and the household.
Another challenge for women breadwinners is how they relate with their friends. Are their friends supportive? Is their family supportive? Or are they taking shots at them because they don’t spend more time with the kids, go to PTA meetings, and get involved with fundraisers?
As an adviser, I work with them to learn to be a strong financial person not just making the money but knowing what to do with it once they have it, and balancing that piece with the rest of their life.
What makes you crazy about how women view their financial future?
Many younger women still think someone else will be in charge of their financial future and take care of it for them. I recently gave a presentation at a very elite high school. It was a mixed group of girls and guys. I asked the group of girls how many thought that they were going to be responsible for their own financial future. And maybe 5% of the hands went up.
About 90% of women are going to be responsible at some point in their lives for their finances. They will either be divorced, single, or widowed. I don’t want women to get in those situations where they’re vulnerable, and they don’t know anything, and then they trust the wrong person.
What role does fear play?
Fear has made me a huge saver and investor and better adviser. I have always saved up to 50% of my pay, which is a crazy number. I don’t spend what I make. I never have. I never will. I’m now 57, and I’m finally spending, because there’s no reason not to spend at this point in my life. I have to turn the spending spigot on, which is really, really hard for me because fear has kept me from spending all these years. I work with many women in the same situation.
If they have turned off the spending spigot for all these years, when I tell them they can turn it on, they’re like, what? I don’t even know how to do that. It’s such a different shift in mindset.
You write about the designer bag lady syndrome? Explain.
Loads of women who make over $200,000 a year still have the bag lady fear. I am one of them. This is really personal to me. We still feel there’s a chance that we could be penniless, homeless, and a bag lady. It’s a fear — even if it’s irrational in some cases, but it’s what drove them and me all these years to feather my nest.
Have a question about retirement? Personal finances? Anything career-related? Click here to drop Kerry Hannon a note.
What keeps you up at night these days?
What keeps me up at night is that my profession is not changing and is not helping women enough. I want to make a dent in this profession, and I want to change the way women are treated in meetings with their advisers.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work” and “Never Too Old to Get Rich.” Follow her on Bluesky.
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