Live rich to get rich?

MP Dunleavey's column in today's New York Times sheds light on why the national savings rate is a disgrace while the national spending rate is out of sight. Many Americans expect to be rich. And most of those optimists seem to believe that spending will make it so. Not saving and investing. Spending.

"The danger in buying into the idea is that you're going to be rich," Dunleavey notes, " is that you'll spend accordingly - regardless of the impact on your personal financial health. "

Yup, lots of folks would rather live rich than get rich. That doesn't bode well for the future of the wealth-management business. How can you help your clients teach their children to build a little wealth instead of more debt?

By the way, I asked Google about MB Dunleavey and learned that she used to be a dark-haired young woman who wrote about single life for Lifetime. Now she's a blond married woman and a financial columnist for MSN. Check out the archive of her columns.

Women and Investing

The bad news
Women may handle the household checkbook and bill-paying, but too many shy away from investing and long-term financial planning, writes M. P. Dunleavey in The NY Times.

[T]he aversion of many women to money tasks is still surprisingly common — and so is the risk they assume, says Tahira K. Hira, professor of consumer economics at Iowa State University at Ames.

In a study, “Gender Differences in Investment Behavior,” Professor Hira and her co-author Cäzilia Loibl, assistant professor of consumer sciences at Ohio State University, studied more than 900 randomly selected households with incomes of $75,000 or higher. The study forms a chapter in “The Handbook of Consumer Finance Research” (2007, Springer).

The authors found that while “men were more engaged in their personal finances, generally speaking, women tend to do more of the day-to-day tasks,” Professor Hira said. They tended to abdicate their financial roles when it came to planning for the future, saving and investing. “The majority of women found investing to be stressful, difficult and time-consuming,” she said.

The good news
The chief investment officers who handle billions of dollars for big university endowments and private foundations are increasingly likely to be women, another NY Times article reports.

Women manage 10 of the 50 largest endowments and foundations, overseeing a combined $60.6 billion. And "they all outperformed the median annual return of 17.5 percent for university endowments, as measured by the National Association of College and University Business Officers."