Make smart financial decisions
This guide provides the essential information women need to make smart financial decisions and encourages women of all ages to define their financial goals.
The guide explains how to choose professional advisors, make smart investment decisions, protect accumulated assets and be prepared for the achievements - and the challenges - of the future.
the power of investing
the more you know about investing, the more confident you’ll be about making decisions.
None of the factors that define you—your age, marital status, education, or occupation—limit what you can learn about investing or the uses to which you can put your investment knowledge.
What’s more, the difference between women who make the most of investment opportunities and those who don’t isn’t necessarily the amount they invest. Most of the time, it’s how carefully they plan, how soon they start investing, the investment choices they make, and how consistently they stick with it.
Putting Knowledge To Work
Learning investing, like learning anything else, works best when you put your knowledge to work right from the start. It might help to compare learning how to handle a job or play a sport. You certainly weren’t born with those skills, and chances are you had some help on your way to mastering them. But you did it. The same is true of learning about investing.
For First Time Investors:
Identify a goal and the type of investment that may help you reach it—perhaps a mutual fund or stock.
Narrow your choice to a specific investment by talking to your financial advisor.
Invest promptly, reinvest any earnings, and add new money regularly.
Track how well your investment performs by checking its return online, perhaps monthly or quarterly, and compare that return to its benchmark index.
After a year, evaluate how well your investment has performed in comparison with similar investments, with how well you expected it to do and with what you had been earning on your money before you invested.
If the investment is meeting your expectations, keep building it systematically and add another one. If not, consider a different investment.
the gender issue
as a woman, you have a vested interest in being an informed and active investor.
Some things really have changed. More women invest than ever before. A growing number of women participate in employer sponsored retirement plans. Women who invest actively express confidence about their ability to make informed choices and manage their assets. And many of those women tend to invest more thoughtfully than their male counterparts, in part because they are less inclined to take too much risk.
This investing evolution that has occurred since the early 1900s doesn’t provide a complete picture, though. Many women still work in jobs where no retirement plan is offered. What’s more, the majority of people in the US—women included—haven’t saved enough to provide a comfortable retirement, based on information gathered by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). But there are ways to continue to move toward resolving the fear that many women share of outliving their income.