Who manages the money in your household? Chances are, it's the man, but that's all beginning to change. Coming up, millions of American women take stock of their financial futures, find the help they need to put themselves on the path to prosperity. This is a special edition of Nightly Business Report, Women and Money, featuring Cassie Seifert and the Nightly Business Report team. Nightly Business Report is produced in association with Reuters, which provides real-time and historical market data, news and analytics over Quotron Advantage AE. Welcome to this special edition of Nightly Business Report, Women and Money. I'm Cassie Seifert. It's not popular these days to suggest that women and men are different, but when it comes to money issues, research shows that they truly are. And the differences are dramatic enough that they're of concern not only to women, but also men who want their mothers, wives, daughters and colleagues to prosper. As the pay gap narrows and the glass ceiling cracks, light is beginning to shine on the glaring differences between the sexes when it comes to building personal wealth and preparing for the future financially. There is no question that on a very basic level, providing financial planning tools and knowledge is the need of both genders, but that's where it stops in my opinion. The statistics are alarming. Women save only about half of what men do, among single women just one and a half percent of what they make. Women seek counseling for debt management twice as often as men, and only about half as many women as men are covered by pension plans. There is absolutely no question in my mind that we are well on our way in this country of duplicating another generation of impoverished older women in this country. While women are less well prepared for their financial futures than men, women actually need a much more sizable nest egg. The reasons? Women live longer, an average of seven years. Women have shorter careers because they often leave the workforce to care for children and aging parents, and women still make less money than men. But it's the way many women handle the money they do have that could hurt them more than anything. Generations of women have been socialized to believe that money matters are unfeminine, and that's discouraged many women from getting the financial education they need to make sound investment decisions. At the National Center for Women and Retirement Research at Long Island University, Executive Director Chris Hayes has identified three behaviors that hold many women back. First, women tend to be mattress stuffers. They put money away without developing a plan for making it grow. Counselors say that's a reflection of how women view money. It appears that men tend to see money as a symbol of power more than women do. Women tend to see it more as a means to get them more security or love. Second, many women will go out of their way to avoid risky investments, even if it ensures that they'll lose buying power to inflation. That's a reflection of what women say they want from money. If I say financial freedom, what does that mean to you? And men say independence, not to have to work if I don't want to, to do what I want when I want to do it, that's what it means to them. And when I say to women, what does financial independence mean to you, most of them will answer security. And third, women tend to study investment alternatives so long and so thoroughly that they sometimes never take action. That can be a reflection of low confidence. They may not feel that they are sophisticated enough to know what they're doing. So there's a great deal of self-doubt and self-denial involved here, too. At Knightly Business Report, we found this information so startling that we decided to do some of our own research to see if women are really struggling as much as other people's studies suggest. And I'm sorry to say that we, too, found most women woefully unprepared for their financial futures. In a survey conducted for Knightly Business Report by Yankelovich Partners, nearly a third of women surveyed said that they currently save none of their income. About another third said they save under 15 percent of what they make, and only 23 percent save more than that. And of great concern, 8 percent of women in the survey said they don't know whether any of their household income is being set aside for the future. On the issue of taking reasonable risks to make their money grow, our survey, like others, found that women are less aggressive than they may need to be. Of women with savings, 70 percent said they keep money in cash or certificates of deposit, while only 34 percent hold stocks and only 23 percent own bonds. This is a concern because stocks and bonds have much better long-term rates of return than cash or CDs. But in one important area, the findings of our study differed greatly from the others. When asked whether men and women have an equal base of knowledge to make informed investment decisions, 77 percent of the women in our study said yes. Only 22 percent said no. And when we asked men the same question, they had even more confidence in women, 83 percent saying yes, women have an equal base of investment knowledge. This growing confidence seems to stem from the tremendous number of women who are getting involved with money issues for the first time ever, and they're doing it in a very serious way. These are the faces of hope and anticipation. These are women trying to overcome what's been called the fear of finance. People tend to think that finance, because we haven't learned about it, is a hard, difficult subject and it's dry, and gosh, I don't know about that stuff. I failed in maths. I'll never be able to do this. So what we try and project is this is really easy. You want to buy low and sell high. Thousands of women around the U.S. are now attending seminars and workshops, similar to this one sponsored by the National Center for Women in Retirement Research, where the fundamentals of financial planning are explored. Women now want to make a lot of these decisions themselves. Women's advocacy groups have long been concerned about the failure of many women to save and invest. Many of these programs say that far too many women still get involved with money issues only because of a crisis. I've been widowed twice, the first time at 27 with an eight-month-old baby and with very little money left to me. The second time was seven and a half years ago. I have a business, Gorman Advisory Services. I've been a party planner, I guess it's 1978 I began the business, and I'm very smart, but I'm very dumb about things about money. No, not dumb, experts say, just inexperienced, as are about 80 percent of women according to several research studies. Even most young, working women with high incomes are novices when it comes to investing. No one in school or my parents, they never talked about it, and so if you don't know about it, there's no way, if it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. Another way women are learning is through investment clubs, many of them inspired by the Beardstown ladies and their Common Sense Investment Guide, which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. We hear from so many trying us that they had started their club and that we really were their inspiration, and so that's wonderful. The message of the ladies from Beardstown, Ohio is that they beat Wall Street, and you can too. It seems other women are repeating their success. Women that have become educated and who have taken an interest in investing have proven themselves to be very good in investing. They did a study on investment clubs, male versus female clubs, and the male clubs did not do as well as the female clubs. Whether it's through workshops, seminars, clubs, or other means, researchers say one of the best things about women's new interest in money issues is that it gets them talking about investments, and it's been a failure to talk about investments that's kept so many women from learning more until now. When we would talk at midnight or 5 a.m. or whatever, we'd talk about clothes at one time. Now we talk about the stock market. And women aren't just talking about investing, they're writing about it too. The business bestseller lists are beginning to be populated by a new breed of book, those specifically for women, and many of those books are jam-packed full of useful tips on getting started as an investor. Virtually every author writing for women agrees with Anne Diamond and her book Fear of Finance that the best way to get going is to set goals for the short, medium, and long term. I have found that I can tell people to save money until I'm blue in the face, and nobody's going to do that because it sounds like I'm saving for a rainy day, which does not sound all that inspiring to me. I don't think it inspires anyone else either. However, if I can motivate people to want something in their life, then all of a sudden funding sounds very inspirational. Some of the specific short-term goals that require funding include vacations, new clothes, and anything else that can take a bite out of your budget in the next year. Medium-term goals for the next two to five years might include a new car, furniture, or starting a business. And every woman's list of long-term goals should include a retirement plan. Finally you've set goals, Diamond says you've got to get organized and figure out exactly where your money is going. The best way to begin this process is to get your documents in order. Things like stock certificates, your homeowner's insurance policy, a power of attorney, and a list of things you own should go into a safe deposit box, but you should not keep your will, life, or disability insurance policy information there because a safe deposit box is usually sealed at death. So those things should go into a filing cabinet at home, along with bank and brokerage statements, credit card records, and tax information. When you're organized, it'll be easier to figure out exactly how much money you have and how you spend your money. Diamond suggests using a workbook or a computer for this because it can take some of the emotion out of the process and build confidence. Diamond's book, like many others, includes tables, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks and do a little addition to know where you stand financially. And computer software, including Quicken and Managing Your Money, will even do the math for you once you fill in the blanks in their financial planning forms. People are very intimidated if they don't have the building block that allows them then to go on and to further themselves in investing. So the building blocks are determining their cash flow, understanding how to do a budget, making a net worth statement for themselves, being able to plan their retirement, or do all those very basic items that many women think they're supposed to know just by osmosis. Next, the author of What Every Woman Should Know About Her Husband's Money, Shelby White, says people need to prepare for emergencies. And she should know. She got involved with money issues only after her husband drowned, and she didn't have a what-if plan. But if you find yourself in this situation, you should know what you're going to do. Every woman should have some idea of what would happen if your income stopped, if your husband was disabled, if you had to stop working. You have to really have a plan for these different scenes. A critical part of every what-if plan is an emergency fund. Most financial advisors suggest saving up enough money to cover your regular expenses for at least three months. That money should be kept in an account or investment that's stable and easy to get your money out of. Then White says, plunge right in. But at first, only with an amount of money you can afford to lose. Say what you might spend on a piece of clothing. Learning is by doing, and so I think for most people, the best way to start investing is to start investing. Now, that's a very hard thing to say, but if you don't start, it will be like trying to play golf by watching a movie or doing anything else. It's really a participation, and if you begin to participate, no matter how much money you have, if you start to do something with it, you will learn. Once you've got an emergency plan in place, set your goals, and gotten ready to invest, then Esther Berger, author of Money Smart, Secrets Women Need to Know About Money, says it's time to diversify. Diversification is a very nice brokerage way to say don't put all your eggs in one basket. What it essentially means is that you should select from the various asset classes, and frankly, it seems like there are about a gazillion investment choices out there. It comes down to three basic categories, and that's cash and cash equivalents, stocks, and bonds. Generally, Berger tells women who attend the seminars she gives, those categories should be matched to the goals they've already set. What I find heartening is that women really are not only hearing the message, they're getting excited by it, and instead of feeling like it's an arduous task, like it's, oh my god, I should do this, it's, oh my god, I can do this, and that's a tremendous shift in psychology, and as we all know, at the risk of sounding simplistic, if you don't believe you can do it, you can't do it. Joining me now in the studio is Esther Berger. Esther, tell us more about the different asset classes. There are basically three different asset classes, Cassie. Cash and cash equivalents, stocks, and bonds. Everything else is pretty much more of the same, just wrapped up in different packaging, different bells and whistles. And when you say cash, you don't necessarily mean just cash in someone's wallet. It includes all different kinds of bank accounts. Absolutely. Passbook accounts, savings accounts, money market mutual funds, very short-term, super safe investments, low risk, low return. And which of the goals are these low return investments most appropriate for? Two specific goals come to mind. One is for use as emergency money, if you feel that you're going to have a short-term need for possibly something to tide you over in case of financial crisis, in terms of any type of medical crisis. This is an excellent place to have, as a parking place, if you will, for these emergency needs. Secondly, if you're considering investing in stocks and bonds and are unclear about when you might like to do that, using cash and cash equivalents is an excellent parking place, if you will, while you're deciding what your shopping list is of stocks and bonds. And then, what is it appropriate to buy stocks to meet your goals? Stocks, in my opinion, are most appropriate if you have minimally an intermediate to, best case, a longer-term time horizon. I feel that you should own stocks for no less than three to five years to really constitute a serious investment. Historically, not my opinion, the longer you hold stocks, typically very good quality stocks, of course, the better you're going to do over time. And what about bonds, then? Bonds can actually have differing maturities from less than one year all the way to 30 years plus. Best case is you want bonds to be in a laddered or staggered portfolio of maturities. The premise here is that you might hold some two-year, four-year, six-year, et cetera paper, so some will come due, they will roll over. You're essentially hedging interest rate bets as well. With your short-term paper coming due two years out as an example, if interest rates are higher, you will reinvest at a higher rate. If they are lower, you've locked in higher rates on the long end, so essentially you're covering all the bases that way. Now, if you're investing for medium or long-term goals, when would you want to buy individual stocks or bonds versus a mutual fund? A couple of different times. Number one, if you want to be very hands-on with your investments, if you want to closely monitor them and take responsibility for doing so, and if you have sufficient funds to diversify a portfolio adequately, then you can do a do-it-yourself portfolio of stocks and bonds. If on the other hand, you don't really want to be in the loop on a day-to-day basis in terms of making financial decisions, but would like to have somebody else calling the shots, if you will, there is where you may be a good candidate for a mutual fund. Also, if you have relatively small dollars to invest, you're not going to be able to get enough diversification, so there is where you're a very good candidate for mutual fund investing. You can begin to get into mutual funds with very small initial investments. Very small dollars, some as little as $250, some I've read $100. It's really quite amazing. And it's an excellent place for young people and beginning investors to start really getting their feet wet. And now, all mutual funds are not created equal. There are some that are appropriate for some goals that carry more risk with a potentially greater rate of return. Tell us about some of the different types of mutual funds. Mutual funds, Cassie, come in all shapes and sizes. They come from bond funds, and they can be government securities to very aggressive types of bonds. In the stock family of funds, so to speak, you have everything from very blue chip funds to aggressive growth funds, value approaches, growth approaches, and everything in between. So you very much want to select a fund that's appropriate to your needs specifically. My advice would be to call the fund, ask them what the stocks and bonds are that they hold, how long the manager has been around, very important in terms of gauging track record, what their turnover is in the portfolio. Make sure that fund is appropriate for you before you invest your dollars. Okay. Thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. The growing interest of many women in investing is attracting the attention of mutual fund companies, insurers, bankers, and brokerage firms. They're all jumping on the marketing to women bandwagon, and the new market could be a gravy train for those companies who succeed. But the big financial services firms haven't always been as eager to work with women as they are today. It wasn't long ago that these customers were persona non grata on Wall Street. Into the 1970s, most brokerage firms wouldn't even open an account for a woman without the signature of a man, her husband, father, or lawyer. Would you raise your hand if you feel you're not saving enough for retirement? But today, women are being courted by financial services firms with educational seminars, special advertising campaigns, and printed materials designed specifically for them. If you don't address women, you're going to miss out on a very major part of the market, so it's simply stupid not to seek out female investors and give them the best service that you can. The growing number of women earning substantial salaries first caught Wall Street's attention in a significant way about five years ago. And now, with women starting their own businesses at such a rapid pace that the Bureau of Labor Statistics says they're soon expected to own half of all companies in the U.S., financial services firms say they can no longer afford to ignore them. All women, because they outlive men, will generally be the asset managers at the end of their lifetimes when assets are greatest. And so, clearly, women represent for us today in potentially a disproportionately large segment of our market. Women already make up 47 percent of the people with wealth of more than a half million dollars, and 35 percent of all people with riches worth at least five million dollars. In spite of the great wealth they control, some stockbrokers say they've traditionally avoided women because women tend to take their time making investment decisions. But some financial counselors, like the mother and daughter team Valerie and Janine Crane, now take a comprehensive approach, gathering their customers' assets and building a financial plan before expecting them to buy. Don't worry, I'm going to be here until you can run. So we are financial psychiatrists. Yeah. And brokers like the Cranes are being handsomely rewarded for their patience. What we also know about women is that once they're comfortable with that relationship, they're going to stick with it. They are much less likely than men either to change financial advisors or to have multiple financial advisors. Brigid McCaskill of Oppenheimer Funds was one of the first Wall Street executives to make an effort to develop women clients, and that helped her to win the CEO title recently. She acknowledges, however, that women getting into the investment game for the first time could be encouraged by all of the new marketing efforts to take more risk than they're comfortable with. And McCaskill says never rely on just one company's advice. Never ever turn over all the decision-making to anybody else. Never sign a form that says you have the ability to make investment decisions on my behalf without consulting me, because that really protects women against a situation where somebody can do something with their money that's not what they want. Another rule to follow is to never do business with any financial advisor who uses language you don't understand and refuses to explain what the jargon means. The vocabulary used in the world of investing can sometimes be daunting, and was certainly not developed to be female-friendly. Would a woman, after all, choose a bull and a bear as symbols for the ups and downs in the stock market? Probably not, but that doesn't mean women can't learn to talk the talk. And often a good financial advisor can help to ease the way by explaining some of the subtleties of Wall Street speak. There are several different kinds of investment advisors. Tax preparers, tax accountants, and CPAs can help you at year end. In some cases, they may also be able to help you evaluate your investment performance. But you'll need a broker or financial planner to implement your investment strategy throughout the year. Brokers have traditionally been in the business of buying and selling stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, but as you heard a moment ago, are now acting sometimes as financial planners. Financial planners will evaluate your overall financial situation, set up budgets, help you get a retirement savings plan in place, and evaluate your insurance needs. So how do you find good advisors? Well, most experts suggest using your shopping skills. Ask family, friends, and colleagues for referrals, and attend seminars where you can see planners in action. Since your financial health can be as important as your physical health, approach finding an advisor like you would finding a doctor. Once you've gathered a few names, do some interviewing. After all, you'll be employing these people, and in some cases, paying them a lot of money. Remember, they'll be working for you, not the other way around. Some of the questions you may want to ask these people include, what's your background and what are your professional qualifications? How are you compensated in? How much will your services cost me? Brokers and planners sometimes receive sales commissions in addition to fees. More on this in a moment. How much time will preparing my financial plan take, and how often will I see you? What will you need from me to do a thorough job? Finally, and perhaps most important, can I call you with questions, and will you take the time to explain things to me until I feel that I fully understand? Joining us again now is Esther Berger, author of Money Smart. Esther, after women go through all of those questions with a potential advisor, how should they evaluate the responses? I think the response has to be what's most important to you as a potential investor. As an example, from the get-go, you have to develop a rapport with the person who you're interviewing. And they, in fact, should be interviewing you as well, Cassie. It's very important for them to ask you questions in turn. Nobody should be talking about the latest investment du jour. Nobody should have a prepackaged plan that they plug every client who walks in the door into. So, when you develop this rapport, it's important for the financial professional to get to know who you are and be as forthcoming as you're comfortable being. In other words, that could mean sharing tax returns. It could mean telling them about potential inheritance, children that you want to put through college. Give them as much information as possible so you can get the best response from them in terms of the services that they can provide. So women need an advisor who's really going to pay attention to their specific needs, not come up with a prepackaged idea. Absolutely, because you're not a packaged product. You're one of one. And you shouldn't be lumped together with someone's 10, 20, 50, 100 other clients. They have to understand that you are an individual with very specific individual needs and objectives. Sometimes a good financial professional, in fact, has to help you clarify what those needs and objectives are. And they should be able to do that as well by, again, interviewing you as you interview them. Now, not all financial professionals are created equal. Financial planners, for example, some of them have specific educational credentials and requirements that they've met to get a designation such as a CFP. Tell us a little more about that. Correct. A certified financial planner is someone who's undergone extensive testing. It's a 10-hour test, continuing education requirements, ethics requirements, experience requirements. So this is a person who has been deemed qualified to help you with your financial life. You draw a distinction between a certified financial planner and someone who calls himself a financial planner, which can essentially mean anyone who hangs out a shingle and says that they're, today, a financial planner. That doesn't necessarily mean anything to you in terms of qualification, education, experience or ethics. And that's an important point of distinction. And what about the difference between financial planners and stockbrokers? Because you, for example, are a certified financial planner, but you also have an affiliation with Payne Weber. Right. And that's an interesting point, Cassie, a lot of financial lines are blurring, so to speak, where you have brokerage firms that used to traditionally be very much commission-based and specifically commission-based, which means in plain English that brokers were compensated for buying and selling securities, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, et cetera. Now many firms are, in fact, wearing some semblance of a financial planning hat. And I think that's very important because people's financial needs have changed. So some firms, in fact, are moving toward what's called fee-based arrangements, which means unlike being compensated by commission, buying and selling commission, they're essentially helping you locate investment managers who are compensated by fees. They get a percentage of the assets that they manage. Therefore, they're on the same page that you are. It's to their advantage to make your dollars grow because they would get a percentage of greater dollars. Now, if I came to you as a financial planner, I may pay you a fee to prepare a plan for me. But then, are there some people in your position who would then also receive commissions from the buying and selling of the securities that I purchase to meet my goals? Again, an important distinction to be drawn. Certified financial planners, again, come in all shapes and sizes. There are fee-only planners who are compensated much like CPAs or other professionals are on a per diem or an hourly basis. They are not in the business of selling you anything, they are not commission-based, and typically they are, again, only being paid by the hour, so you pay as you go based on the complexity of your needs. You also have what's called fee-based planners that can typically charge by the hour and sometimes apply that hourly fee or charge separate fees for commission-based products, most typically annuities, mutual funds, insurance-type products. Draw a distinction between those people and people who are employed at brokerage firms who, most often, are fee-based or commission-based, typically not per diem or hourly-based. So it can be very complicated, I think. An important point to make is that women have to ask and they shouldn't be afraid to ask about these things. Quite the contrary. A good professional, an honest professional, is going to try to do the best possible job for you that he or she can possibly do. In plain English, when someone comes into my office to see me, I want to know what their needs are to see if I am, in fact, the best person to help them achieve those needs. If not, you can be sure that I'm going to make a referral to an appropriate colleague of mine who can best help them with what they need to achieve. Okay. Let's take a few minutes and talk about divorce because divorce can be a very critical time for women to reevaluate their financial situations and one when the objectivity of working with a financial advisor can be particularly important. You've written a sequel to Money Smart called Money Smart Divorce. Tell us a little bit about that. The dynamics of divorce are unlike that of any other life transition, Cassie, without question, both the emotional and financial dynamics. As anyone who's been through a separation can attest to, it can get sometimes downright ugly. It is not a pretty story. A lot of power struggle, a lot of emotional issues, constellate and knock down, drag out battles about money. And all too often, particularly if a woman has not been in the financial loop during her marriage, after the marriage or during the separation, in the settlement agreement, it's like the husband gets the stockbroker and the banker and the CPA and she's left with a bunch of boxes and questions and no one to ask and she can't make heads or tails out of anything. So very often women are completely left to drift post-divorce and it's a scary, scary place to be. Now, should a woman in a good marriage be concerned about the financial consequences of divorce? Absolutely. Statistically in this country, divorce is on the increase, sad to say. And it's not till death do us part anymore and it used to be that we, who were brought up in the 1950s and certainly earlier on, were raised to believe in Prince Charming. Well, Prince Charming doesn't exist anymore. You can ask Princess Diana if you don't want to take my word for it. It just doesn't happen anymore. So even those of us who are fortunate enough to be in excellent marriages need to be prepared in advance. And that doesn't mean sounding the death knell of your marriage. It just means being money smart. What are the one or two most important things that women can do in advance, just in case the worst thing possible happens? Check the titling on all your assets for starters. I think that's very important. Know what you own, know how it's titled, know how the ownership is held, and know where everything is because most people don't have a clue where their stocks, bonds, and mutual funds are. And many people are diversified a little bit too much and they have statements and brokerage accounts and bank accounts all over the map and it's very difficult to get your house in order if you don't even know where the rooms in the house are. So that's very substantive information. Secondly, get to know the financial professionals with whom you work. Develop a rapport, develop a working relationship with them, and get to know them. The more information you get now, the less catch up you're going to have to play later if push comes to shove. Okay, great. Thank you again, Esther. My pleasure. We really appreciate it. Remaining in control of your money is perhaps the single most important theme that all financial advisors stress. That's good advice for everyone, regardless of gender or of age. The importance of getting a grip on managing money is even getting through to Girl Scouts. Thanks to a special pilot program in Pennsylvania, the next generation of women is getting a head start. These young women belong to the Hemlock Girl Scout Council of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They're working toward their merit badges in money sense and money management by becoming the first troop to play the stock market game. We invested in IBM and Microsoft. For Microsoft, we used the Windows at school on the computers, and IBM, we just thought they were going to be a good company because of the computers. The stock market game was developed by the Securities Industry Association. Teams of young people are given an imaginary $100,000 to invest over the course of 10 weeks, and now the Girl Scouts of America hopes to turn these young women into real-life investors someday by exposing them to the exciting world of stocks. I hope that they go up every day because when I sell it, I'll make more money. We hope they go up every day, too. That wraps up this special edition of Nightly Business Report. If you'd like to learn more about some of the personal finance topics we've discussed in this program, Nightly Business Report has a whole series of videotapes available on how Wall Street works, how to plan for retirement, how to save for a college education, and how to buy mutual funds. We leave you now with some suggestions on places where you can get additional information on investing that's geared specifically to women. Thank you very much for joining us. It's a pleasure. 3 2 1 2 3 The Nightly Business Report has a video for anyone who's thinking about investing in stocks. It's How Wall Street Works, winner of the American Film and Video Festival's Blue Ribbon Award. To order by credit card, call 1-800-535-5864.