Baltimore-based psychotherapist Ginger Dean works with many professional women, married and single — women with advanced college degrees, successful careers and well-paying jobs, who despite all of the above, have not done any type of financial planning.
Worse yet, few are doing anything to remedy that.
Why?
"I find that many women I talk to still have this archaic perspective of the world, which is that men take care of money," Dean says. "A lot of the women I come across feel they need to find a man to do this for them. Even highly educated women subscribe to that idea and many of them, if they are married, will even relinquish control of their money to their husband."
Dean became interested in financial planning after suffering from serious money issues (student loan debt, excess credit card debt) and after realizing that no one was going to bail her out of that mess but herself.
Getting to where she wanted to be meant educating herself on personal finance. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, she says, "we still don't have [personal finance] as either a part of high school or undergraduate education." Educating herself lead to the creation of her blog, www.girlsjustwannahavefunds.com, which Dean describes as a chronicle of her personal journey toward understanding the importance of financial independence and proper financial planning.
The blog also serves as a forum for women to discuss their financial issues and, she says – "it aims to break financial ceilings and communicate to women that we should be in control of our finances, that we should not have to take the limits prescribed by the prevailing paradigm."
In a sense, it serves as the first port of call for women who want to get on top of their finances and seriously consider the importance of financial planning — women who would be well served by working with a financial advisor.
Unfortunately, "most of them don't even think about financial advisors because they're still conditioned by the idea that finance is not a subject for them," Dean says, "and that comes from the fact that financial planning is a conversation most parents are still having with their sons but not with their daughters, which automatically means they're not having the conversation about a financial planner."
Kathleen Kingsbury, founder of consulting and training firm KBK Wealth Connection, says that society plays a big role in the way women perceive themselves and think about financial planning.
