Be Well: How Women Can Create Financial Power

<div class="block">Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, joined, &#39;beWell&#39; to talk about how women can grow their financial power, specifically through investing. She also provided a few tips that women can begin practicing today.</div>

beWell

From Barbie to Beyonce to Taylor Swift's era tour. This summer, women have been flexing our financial power and for more on how we can build our wealth for the long term and boost our financial wellness. I'm joined right now by Sally Kraze, one of the first female CEO S on Wall Street, co founder and CEO of Vest an investing platform for women. So I guess first start by why an investing platform for women. Well, because women today don't invest nearly as much as men do and investing has really been the scalable way to build wealth. When you invest for the long term, it's been buying a home which a lot of folks don't have access to or investing in the stock and bond markets and women haven't done it as much as men have. And we have a saying in all of us, nothing bad happens when women have more money and so make building something for women that helps women in particular invest when Wall Street and the investing industry have really fallen short on that. Yeah. Why do you think that women don't have those same comp? Yeah. Well, some of it is we don't earn as much as men do. But even beyond that, we don't invest as large a portion of our net worth as men do. And the industry mild in industry, well, women are risk averse and we say, well, wait a second, maybe, but maybe in an industry where 98% of mutual fund dollars are managed by men and 86% of financial advisors are men. We love men but maybe they built a business for themselves. Why don't we build a business that really centers women? I love that. Ok, so I know that there are five different things. Uh you know, keys for women. So what are they? Yeah, well there are more, there are many but let's start with 51 of which is, which may be the most difficult. It's ok to want money, it's ok to want to build wealth and it's not that difficult. We receive so many negative messages as women around money about how we spend too much, too, too many lattes, too many pumpkin spice lattes. You got to get that garbage out of your mind. It's ok to go to a Taylor Swift concert if you save elsewhere. So number one, get the garbage out of your head. Number two, build a budget doesn't sound like fun but as simple how much is coming in, how much is going out so that you've got more coming in than going out. Number three, pay off high interest rate debt, anything above 5% any credit card debt that is sucking away at your wealth. Number four, build an emergency fund so that you've got 3 to 6 to 8 months of take home pay in case something bad happens. And then number five, my favorite invest, invest, invest, invest so that your money can get working for you, right? Because you want your money making money. So when you say that, do you mean treasury bonds or do you mean real estate or that's where you come to all of us? Because for everybody, it should be different. It should be different based on your age. It should be different based on what your goals are. It should be different if you're a woman because if you're saving for retirement, you are earning less, you are taking more career breaks and you are living longer. And so you need to adjust for that as a woman, which most firms don't do, which all of us does. So do you find that women invest differently than men? I find that women invest better than men that when we invest, we tend to stay the course. Whereas men again love them, tend to actually during this most recent downturn, freak out a little bit more and tend to take action or take their money out. Whereas women really stay the course. They, they set a plan and they stay to the plan and they trade less which perhaps counterintuitively can lead to better returns. Thank you so much. It was so lovely meeting you. I really enjoyed this conversation too. Thank you.