Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 21, 1990 TAG: 9004210269
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: VIVIAN MARINO ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Matt feels reasonably comfortable with things like corporate bonds or growth stocks. Barbara gets uneasy at the mention of those words.
Still, the Jacksonville, Fla., couple, who recently opened a hair-replacement business, mix love and money successfully. They keep half their $200,000 investment portfolio in stocks and bonds and the rest in short-term certificates of deposit or money market accounts.
Neither makes an investment decision without the other.
But for every couple like the Fishers, there are several more that fail to jointly plan or even discuss important personal financial matters.
Even though women have emerged from the Money Decade of the '80s as the fastest-growing part of the work force, their role in shaping the family's financial future remains stuck in a bygone world, some investment planners say.
"Women are still in a very transitional role in which a man makes the investment decisions," said Marilyn Cohen, a principal of Capital Insight Inc. of Beverly Hills, Calif.
"I don't find the young urban professional woman any more interested in money and investing than her mother who had a traditional housewife role," she said. "I find it very distressing."
Michael Stein, a financial planner with Brownson Rehmus & Foxworth in Chicago, said he's encountered apathy in many of the working women among his married clients, who mostly are wealthy, middle-aged executives.
While the wives might be more likely to manage day-to-day family finances like balancing the checkbook and paying household bills, the husbands usually have the upper hand in making the major financial decisions, he said.
"Often where you have two executive units . . . the husband still tends to be the dominant one," Stein said. "A dominating woman is the exception more than the rule."
Not surprisingly, couples' financial concerns vary with age. Investment counselors say a younger couple likely will be more concerned with making house payments and accumulating wealth than a middle-aged pair, which is starting to think about retirement or paying off a child's college loan.
"I've seen very successful women who go home and turn their paychecks over to their husbands," said Victoria Felton-Collins, a financial planner and psychologist who wrote the recently published book "Couples & Money."
"They may manage millions of dollars for their companies, but when they get home it's a different story," she said.
That is slowly changing, however, as women continue to enter the work force and gain financial confidence.
"Maybe it's going to take another generation - the daughters of these young urban professional women," said Cohen."They see their working mothers bringing home paychecks."
About 60 percent of all working-age women are employed outside the home, and by the year 2000, women are expected to make up about half the nation's work force.
Full-time women workers are making more than they once did, and some bring home nearly as much as their spouses. Still, only one in six married women working full time brings home more money than her husband, a figure that has remained constant for a decade.
Census Bureau figures show that, on average, women still earn only about 65 percent of their husbands' incomes.
Often, it's not until death or divorce that women take a more active role in their financial futures, said Jan Warner, a Columbia, S.C., lawyer who runs SoloSource Inc., a service that counsels divorced women on financial options.
Warner estimates that three-quarters of his female clients, most of whom are 40 or older, come to him without the financial know-how needed to make it alone comfortably.
"The average person that comes to us has been the victim of the demise of a 15- to 20-year-old marriage with no business acumen because she has relied on someone else to do it," he said. "And we deal with some pretty good businesswomen."
Mary Lynn, 47, a real estate broker from Cleveland, fits into that category. Recently divorced from her husband of 24 years, she has crammed to learn enough about investment matters to make it on her own.
The woman, who asked not to be identified by her full married name, said she expected to receive between $50,000 and $60,000 once the family house is sold. She's looking for investments.
"He just basically did all the decision-making where money was concerned," she said of her former husband. "I guess that was one of the sore spots. He never really asked or consulted me."
Stein, the financial planner, said that wives of breadwinners, no matter how stable their marriages might seem, should try to garner some financial independence. He suggested they establish credit and accumulate assets solely in their own names, since their husbands likely are doing just that through their own company retirement plans.
"Money and the inability to discuss it openly and honestly causes more problems than anything else," said Hank Madden, a financial planner with IDS Financial Services Inc.'s Jacksonville, Fla., office, who has been advising the Fishers.
The hair-replacement entrepreneurs stand out among his clients because each would be prepared to make an investment decision individually, Madden said. Still, he said, their financial philosophies appear to reflect some sexual stereotypes.
"Barbara is my conscience. She is more frugal," Matt Fisher, 34, said of his wife.
"I'm concerned with losing money. That's my biggest fear," said Barbara, 42. "He has a more in-depth grip on what's happening. He would come home and tell me about whatever he's interested in, and we would make a decision together."
by CNB