Why Women Play Russian Roulette with their Financial Future

“I woke-up from my personal finance coma.”

That particular night was cold, so cold my then boyfriend (now husband) and I had resorted to taping plastic over the windows—a vain attempt to trap warmth—in our heat-leaching apartment. We’d invited our financial advisor (we’ll call him John) over to review our (mine and his, we weren’t “together” financially yet) previous year’s portfolio performance and discuss our investment strategy for the upcoming year.

John had come armed with a bottle of wine and our respective annual reports—complete with benchmarks for comparison—highlighting respectable portfolio gains. The evening was casual, cozy even. I’d prepared a meal and we exchanged pleasantries, and now we were about to dig into the real meat of the night.

As John spread a mass of paperwork across our kitchen table, I felt uneasy. There was SO much paper, documentation I hadn’t seen until that night. Yet, the conversation was so neat, so tidy and so superficial. Frankly, it would have been easy to call it an evening, but I had many unanswered questions.

“What’s the difference between a front-end load (FEL) and no-load management expense,” I blurted out. For the briefest of moments, surprise flickered across John’s face, before he smoothly replied, “They’re the same thing.”

Wrong answer, John.

That night, I awoke from my personal finance coma. This experience, among many others, is why I launched Pound Wise and Penny Prudent™, a community focused on empowering women, helping them move from a place of fear to confidence to take ownership of their financial future. It’s my mission to help women—through research and writing, workshops, and one-on-one coaching to learn how they too can save, manage and invest their money.

For the last 15 years, I’ve educated myself and taken over the responsibility of managing my savings and investments, and now our investments. I know there are other women who successfully and confidently navigate their financial future, but I know many more who don’t. Often, women defer financial decisions to partners or experts. This is better than nothing, but not much. Without their oversight, women risk playing Russian roulette with their financial future.

So, what gives? Why do we continue to treat the conversation surrounding saving, managing and investing our hard earned dollars as a topic more taboo than sex? It’s not for a lack of information. Yet, if news’ headlines and conversations over cocktails bear truth there’s a disconnect between knowing what we should do and having the confidence to do it.

Let’s commit to closing the financial gender gap. Let’s gain the confidence to manage our pennies and invest our pounds. It’s the only way we’ll truly be free to make choices that are right for us.