TheStreet / Personal Finance: Women’s Financial Wellbeing Requires a Tailored Approach
Adviser Marguerita Cheng says that if women aren’t transforming their earnings into wealth, the financial services industry has to shoulder part of the blame — and devise a solution.
Two decades after the Food & Drug Administration started receiving complaints that Ambien and other sleep aids made women taking them particularly groggy the next morning, and even might have been responsible for driving accidents, the agency accepted and responded to the scientific evidence behind the anecdotes. It turns out that women’s bodies simply metabolized the active ingredient, zolpidem, in all these sleep aids much more slowly than men did. In 2013, the FDA finally acted, slashing the recommended dosage of these medications in half for women.
Medicine isn’t the only field where attitudes that what is “good for the goose is good for the gander” still prevail. Equality is a wonderful goal, whether it’s a good night’s sleep or retirement security. How women reach those equal outcomes, however, may require taking a different pathway, whether it’s a question of medical or financial advice. Even the definition of what “financial success” and a good relationship with an investment adviser looks like can be very different for women than for men.
I’ve seen many of my clients come to understand what this means. One, a widowed woman in her 60s, began working with me after her husband’s death. The financial adviser they had consulted with previously saw her husband as the client, and rarely even looked her in the eyes when discussing what the couple themselves viewed as a joint financial plan. “I miss my husband, but I need someone who understands where I am, and who I can talk with,” she told me.
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