Welcome to the Money Maven's Financial Blog

Money Maven Blog by Sheryl Sutherland, Authorised Financial Adviser and Director of The Financial Strategies Group

Wednesday, 29 July 2009

Who's Counting

We like odds of 50 per cent more than probabilities of 25 per cent or 75 per cent. This is why we buy lotto tickets.What are the odds of dying in a plane crash compared to dying on the roads? Twice as many people die on the roads during a year than the total of those who have died in air accidents. Yet we fear flying more than driving. Air fatalities evoke shock but road deaths are simply another standard news item. We are drawn to the most astonishing...

Everyday Money

A paper presented at the Australian Social policy conference at the University of NSW found that divorce had a substantial impact on women’s incomes and almost none on men’s. But, it appears that men are not happy! Could it be that they are used to having someone doing the cooking, cleaning and organising their social life? Or could it be that they don’t want to pay child support?The study found that divorced men’s average income after they had paid...

Why?

Why is it still acceptable to subordinate women to men? Well, the religions of the world respond, because religious tenets tell us so.In Northern Nigeria a pregnant 13 year old girl, Bariya, received 180 lashes of the cane after being pimped by her father. The State’s Attorney General who, one presumes, has a smattering of education, said “It is the law of Allah”. In Jerusalem “modesty police” terrorise women who talk to men or show ordinary parts...

Musings and Amusings

The Tao of Pooh suggests that ideas float around the universe and pop into the nearest head on a random basis – the latest findings in neuroscience validates this theory. It appears that our brains operate on the edge of chaos. Most of the time our brains operate in an orderly fashion, according to the New Scientist article, “Disorderly Genius: How chaos drives the brain, but every now and then lurches into a blizzard of noise.” The technical term...

Finance and Investments

So what is the key to financial success? To make wise decisions you must have the right information, and combine and weigh its various components correctly. You must not ignore valid information in favour of thinking and judgemental tendencies that are dangerous in the investment world; for example, weighting the most vivid and recent information more strongly than heeding the lessons of history. Investors must develop a mindset that helps them understand...

Womenomics

There have been many articles and even some discussion at the Economic Summit in Davos, over whether the financial meltdown would have been so severe, or would have occurred, if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters. It’s certainly pretty clear that business culture is overwhelmingly male and fuelled by testosterone. In Iceland, officially a bankrupt country, women are cleaning up the mess. Iceland with a population of just over 300,000, has had...