Putting your money to work
August 10, 2021 - CEO of HerMoney.com Jean Chatzky is helping women change their relationship with money to ensure the security they need and the life they want without judgment. What’s more, she assures us, investing is fun!
With her background as a financial editor of NBC today, Wall Street equity stock researcher, and New York Times best-selling author, Jean Chatzky is an acclaimed motivational speaker and fierce advocate for financial literacy, especially among girls and women.
Erudite and straight-talking, when it comes to money, you’re in safe hands. Maybe that’s why Jean is so popular in front of groups of women, as she provides the safe space to ask the questions that may be really on your mind, but you don’t like to ask.
“When I’m in front of a group of women I ask, ‘how many of you are investors?’ and very few hands will go up,” says Jean. “Then I ask, ‘how many of you have a retirement account?’ and every hand will go up. That’s an important connection to make. As women, we’re already investors. We don’t have to be stock pickers. Stock picking is a lot of work, and it is risky, but we can buy a broad stock portfolio such as a total market index fund. What we can’t do is sit with our money as cash in the bank, because then we are losing it after taxes and inflation.”
Investing is a field where there are many unanswerable questions, and that is another reason Jean believes women can be reticent, because women like to know the answer to a question before they ask it and like to know it’s the correct answer. There’s a fear of “not knowing” or “getting it wrong”.
“If you asked me, ‘what’s the best air miles credit card?’ I can answer that question and answer it correctly,” Jean says. “If you asked me, ‘what’s the best stock?’ or, ‘where’s inflation going to go?’ I can answer those questions with a lot of historical knowledge but there’s no guarantee I’m going to be right. That’s the hard part. You have to take a leap of faith.”
For women who don’t know where to start, Jean assures us, the best way to start is to just start. “It's a little bit like having a kid who plays a sport. If you go and watch any kids’ game and you don’t have a child playing it’s boring. Once you have a child playing, you’re into it. It’s like that with investing. Once you have a stake in the game, you’re interested, you’ll pay attention, and it can be fun!”
Jean recommends investing money on a regular basis by figuring out what percentage of your assets to invest in stocks and keep adding to it each time you get paid. There has been a huge growth in interest among women in investing. Jean sees it first-hand on HerMoney.com, a platform she set up by combining her financial and media backgrounds to level the playing field when it comes to financial security, confidence, and power.
“We can tell from our HerMoney community that there’s a sharp increase in interest in investing. Investing means putting your money to work. The most important factor is asset allocation, to balance risk and reward. You can do it with large low-risk funds or managed portfolios such as low-cost exchange-traded funds or a target date fund, where the asset allocation becomes more conservative as the target date approaches. This means you don’t have to think about it, you just need to add to it every time you get paid.”
Jean turned her attention to women after righting her own financial ship, and today she shares her knowledge with content that is welcoming, thought-provoking, bold (and sassy), unbiased and always smart. After all, the economic trends show that women are graduating at higher rates, inheriting more, and will continue to increase their share of global wealth within a couple of decades. So, it’s high time for a judgment-free zone for all things financial.
“We tend to get very judgmental when it comes to other people’s money. When I wrote my latest book - Women with Money: The Judgment-Free Guide to Creating the Joyful, Less Stressed, Purposeful (and Yes, Rich) Life You Deserve – I started by asking hundreds of women what they wanted from their money. I underestimated the degree to which women were focused on safety and security first, whether to take care of their parents, help their kids go to college, leave the world in a better place, or simply make sure their money lasts as long as they live.” As a collective forum, HerMoney is based on the principle that women work way too hard for judgment. “Instead, we’re saying let’s all help each other become more financially secure by answering each other’s questions and supporting each other.”
Jean Chatzky will be joining Six Senses on Tuesday September 21 for a discussion about how to get women back into the driving seat of their finances.
9:00 am New York / 2:00 pm London
Instagram Live @SixSenses
About Jean Chatzky
CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast HerMoney With Jean Chatzky. The financial editor of NBC Today for 25 years and the Financial Ambassador for AARP, she appears frequently on CNN, MSNBC and was a recurring guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author. Her latest book is Women with Money: The Judgment-Free Guide to Creating the Joyful, Less Stressed, Purposeful (and Yes, Rich) Life You Deserve. An in-demand motivational speaker and fierce advocate for financial literacy, in 2015, she partnered with the PwC Charitable Foundation and Time for Kids to launch Your $, an in-school magazine that reaches two million schoolchildren each month.