Why women have trouble getting rich

I understand all of these reasons. I understand the excuses, too. In fact, for many years if they didn’t come out of my mouth, they definitely wrapped their ugly little tentacles around my brain and prevented me from taking action. And I know — reading that — you probably think: No way.  But I also know that somewhere in San Francisco, a woman named Liz is nodding her head. She was my good friend in college and my roommate in Brooklyn when we were in our twenties. And she’s the one who suffered when I didn’t pay the phone bill or the cable bill and our service (on both) got turned off.

Liz knows. But I’m sure that those of you who see me on television and read me in magazines telling you what to do with your money think that I emerged from the womb this way, that my umbilical cord was a ticker tape, that my nursery was wallpapered with dollar bills. I wish that were the case.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I went to college figuring I’d be a systems analyst or an engineer. I got a C in a programming class my freshman year and immediately became an English major. In my first job out of school, as an editorial assistant at Working Woman magazine, I earned all of $11,000 a year. That certainly wasn’t much, but I earned a little extra writing freelance stories and tutoring kids for their SATs. My rent was only $400 a month. I should have been able to manage.

Instead, I did a terrible job. Not only did I neglect to pay my bills, but I racked up credit card debt equal to half a year’s salary. I didn’t understand the benefit of paying down my debt on that 18 percent credit card with money sitting in a savings account where it was earning an anemic 3 percent. (Liz, who worked at Citibank, explained that as well.) I made other mistakes. I completely botched my first foray into a retirement account. I knew that I had this thing called a 401(k) into which my company and I made contributions that slowly added up to about $2,000.

But I didn’t understand very much else about how it worked. I let all the money sit in money market funds when the stock market was making its mid-1980s surge, for example. And I certainly didn’t understand that when I left my job I had to roll the money into another retirement account—an IRA — or I’d be penalized and taxed. I wasn’t even savvy enough to be dismayed when the rollover period lapsed and I got a check for the balance. I paid the taxes and bought a few new outfits with the rest.  Not surprisingly, I lived paycheck to paycheck. I had no desire to think about my money, much less talk about my money. Money was a nuisance, a problem, a worry, a strain.

So you won’t be surprised to hear that when I got married a few years later, I was delighted to give up every bit of financial control. I had become a little better at earning money — doubling, then tripling my small salary — but I wanted nothing to do with it. I signed up to have my paychecks directdeposited into our joint checking account and let my husband do the rest.  I told myself that because he earned substantially more than I did, he had the right to make all the decisions. I convinced myself that because he’d made one brilliant move — buying Microsoft when it was in its infancy — he had a better shot at building our wealth than I did. I assured myself that because I was reporting on money and finances all day at work, I knew plenty about both — so there was no need for me to actually deal with them at home. I even had myself believing that he liked paying the bills. (In retrospect, I realize it always made him cranky.) And I rationalized that I did other things — shopping, cooking — that were equally important to our growing family. We were on the health insurance policy from my employer.  Wasn’t it a fair trade that he fill out all the forms?

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