Womenomics

Why Put a Ring on It?

In America, women are waiting longer to wed than ever, and many are choosing not to do so at all. The freedom to pursue high-powered careers and sexually diverse lives without fear of pregnancy or stigma has turned marriage into a choice, not destiny. By 2009 nearly half of all American adults younger than 34 had never married, a rise of 12 percentage points in less than a decade. Unmarried women outnumber married ones for the first time ever.

Single women are reshaping politics. As women tend to worry more about reproductive rights and fair pay, they have favoured Democrats for president since 1988. But the overall women’s vote hides a divide: in 2012 Mitt Romney narrowly carried married women, while the unmarried rushed to Barack Obama in their millions, giving him a 36-point margin. Single women cast almost a quarter of the votes, nearly guaranteeing his re-election.

Delaying marriage is also having economic effects: women aged 25 to 34 are the first generation to start their careers near parity with men, earning 93% of men’s wages. Single women now buy homes at greater rates than single men, a big step in independent wealth-building.

These trends have some conservatives fretting about the decline of the family. The divorce rate rocketed in the 1970s and 1980s, as women who had rushed into unhappy marriages discovered they could make their own way. The boom in divorce encouraged many in the next generation to abstain from marriage rather than enter a flawed one. Now that marriage is simply one option among many, fewer women are exchanging vows, but those that do tend to be in happier, more co-operative relationships.

The divorce rate, now falling, has plunged fastest among those who stay single longest. Despite the stereotype that high-achieving women are doomed to spinsterhood, the truth is that these women are now the most likely to tie the knot, and can afford to hold out for the right match.

Not all women are celebrating. For some, singlehood is less a choice than bad luck. Outside big cities, women who are unmarried into their late 30's are often pitied. For those who hope to become mothers, biology imposes harsh deadlines – though breakthroughs in fertility treatments have raised the number of women giving birth after age 35 by 64% between 1990 and 2008.

In particular, poor single women face a different landscape. Not all are unmarried by choice: America’s high incarceration rate has shrunk their pool of men. Single parenthood is strongly correlated with poverty. Conservatives duly push marriage as the antidote: the federal government has spent almost a billion dollars on pro-marriage programmes, to little avail.

Source: economist.com

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Frame and Investment

Women Are Owning More and More Small Businesses

Owning your own business is often touted as the ultimate coup in the working world. You set your own hours, pursue projects you’re interested in, and maybe work in your pajamas.

About 29% of America’s business owners are women, that’s up from 26% in 1997. The number of women-owned firms has grown 68% since 2007, compared with 47% for all businesses.

The progress for minority women has been particularly swift, with business ownership skyrocketing by 265% since 1997, the report says. And minorities now make up one in three female-owned businesses, up from only one in six less than two decades ago.

Why have minority women had such an apparent breakthrough in the world of entrepreneurship? It’s partially a numbers game – in 1997 minority women represented such a small number of owners – less than one million – that even moderate growth would have likely helped them outpace the growth of the broader field of women-owners. But Jessica Milli, a senior research associate at IWPR, says that the characteristics of minority women who opt to open businesses may also play a role in the runaway growth.

“Women of colour are more likely to be younger when they first found their business,” says Milli. “Given today’s climate – when a lot of purchasing occurs online and social-media usage can really make or break a business this can mean that those businesses might have a competitive advantage.” 

The growing prevalence of female entrepreneurs of all races didn’t happen by accident. Instead, it may be proof that legislation targeted at women and minority small-business owners are having an effect.

Women business owners still face a significant wage gap and continually have smaller amounts of start-up capital than their male peers.

For one, women-owner businesses make only about 25 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. That’s a much larger gap than the one that exists in the overall labour market, where the median earnings of women were about 83% of men’s.

Although challenges like access to capital and wage equality persist having more women entrepreneurs may be helpful in and of itself when it comes to boosting the successfulness of female owners. Researchers who studied the effect of peer relationships on female entrepreneurs in India found that women who received business training with a friend were more likely to take out business loans, and more likely to report higher business activity and household income than peers who received training without a peer. And though equality on all fronts is still a long way off, the field of entrepreneurship is “moving toward equality in terms of representation, which is a great thing,” Milli says. “Overall, the picture is optimistic.”

Source: theatlantic.com

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Everyday Money

This is One Inheritance You Don't Want

You may have received a big inheritance, even if you're not aware of it: how you handle your money.

Economics professors at the University of Copenhagen have found that if a parent was in default on a loan at the end of the year (their study looked at data from 2004 to 2011), the chance of default for their children was more than four times as high as for those whose parents were model financial citizens. And that’s across all levels of parental income, loan balances and other measures, including that of intelligence.

The study analysed about 30 million personal loans held by some 5 million Danes ages 18 to 45. It linked that information to government data, including income level and education for the borrowers and their parents.

The key finding: The share of 30 year olds in financial trouble – narrowly defined in this study as being at least 60 days late on a loan at the end of the year - was 5 percent among those whose parents showed no similar sign of financial trouble. It was 23 percent for kids whose parents’ records showed financial trouble.

The study follows other research concluding that risk attitudes seem to be handed down by generation. It couldn’t rule out the chance that long-lasting health shocks had an effect on income that carried over to the next generation, but it did find evidence that shared common shocks tied to the business cycle, such as a parent and child unemployed at the same time, weren’t likely causes for the correlation.

An earlier study that lends support to the Copenhagen work found that adoptees with parents who take on more investment risk in their portfolios tend to make financial decisions for their own portfolios that reflect similar levels of risk. It concluded that nurture plays a substantially larger role than nature in financial risk-taking among parents and children.

That’s not to say our hard wiring plays no role. A 2015 study of identical and fraternal twins in Sweden concluded that “genetic differences explain about 33 percent of the variation in savings propensities across individuals,” finding that parenting plays a part in the differences in the twins’ savings behavior early on but that the effect waned over time.

Even if some of our attitudes toward money are hard-wired, no one wants to pass along a legacy of financial instability. There are many ways to nurture self-control and highlight the difference between “wants” and “needs.”

If you’re able to be a smart saver and shopper and make the tough budgeting tradeoffs – and if you let your kids see all that at the grocery store and when you’re paying the bills – they’re likelier to adopt these behaviors as adults.

Source: Bloomberg.com

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Why?

Men Aren’t the Smartest When it Comes to Credit

The majority of men – 61% - describe their knowledge of how credit scores work as good or excellent.

They might want to take a refresher.

More than 40% of men and women questioned in a new poll think a person’s age, marital status, and ethnicity are among the components that determine a credit score. Of course, none of them are. On all three of those questions, a significantly higher percentage of men thought those things played a part in a credit score, according to the annual survey of credit understanding.

The biggest gender-knowledge gap was about whether marital status affected your credit score. Additionally, fewer men correctly choose three ways a consumer could improve a credit score, or maintain a high one.

Rather than a knowledge gap, what women may suffer from in the credit arena is a confidence gap: Even though they largely outdid men on the questions, fewer women – 54% - rated their knowledge of credit as good or excellent.

These figures replicate those relating to both genders, however, showed a decline in their understanding of credit compared with last year’s survey. Fewer people had success with a multiple-answer question about how much more a person with a low credit score could pay on a 60-month auto loan, as well as with more basic facts such as how everyone has more than one credit score, and that credit repair companies rarely wind up actually repairing your credit understanding and confidence for women in investment – read Girls Just Want to Have Funds for more on this. You can order from our website www.strategies.co.nz.

Source: Bloomberg.com

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Musings & Amusings

The gender pay gap persists almost everywhere – and has done so since pre Victorian times.

 

On average, women earn 18% less than men, according to analysis by Korn Ferry Hay Group, a consulting firm which looked at more than 8m employees in 33 countries. The pay gap is largely explained by a lack of women in highly paid roles. Women make up 40% of the global workforce for clerical jobs but only 17% of executive roles.  However, the pay gap shrinks when comparing males and females working at an identical level and function within the same company (but still favours men by 1.6%).

In Britain, more than four decades after the equal pay act was introduced, the headline difference between men and women’s pay is still high. A pledge made in 2015 by David Cameron, Britain's prime minister, to “end the gender pay gap in a generation” is an ambitious one. Women only make up around a third of senior management roles there. Workers at the same level but in different companies still face an average pay gap of over 9%.

The United Arab Emirates, on the other hand, has a reverse pay gap. Women at the same level, company and function actually earn 2% more than their male counterparts. This is partly because fewer women participate in the labour force, and those that do tend to have higher levels of education. In 2014 women made up 13% of the labour force; in Britain the share was 46%.

Source: The Economist

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Everyday Money

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Investors

These are the basics of running your financial life.

In a recent study, just 8 percent of college students taking a recent survey gave themselves an A for how well they manage their finances. In a larger, 2014 survey of U.S. adults, 18 percent gave themselves the top grade for their personal finance knowledge.

Many people get stressed even thinking about managing their money, seeing it as just too complicated. But Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago professor, famously fit the basics of good personal finance on an index card.

Here are seven simple ways to increase the odds of getting in and staying in good financial shape.

Once you’ve got these covered, you can explore investment opportunities. 

1. Save early, and automatically

The point is just to get in the habit of saving. Even if you start small, it’s a start. And seeing your money grow can be very motivating.

2. Expect financial emergencies

About 47 percent of respondents wouldn’t be able to cover an emergency $400 expense without selling something or borrowing money. So when you start saving, you may want to set aside money for an emergency fund before saving for retirement. That’s because, in a financial emergency, many people just tap into a retirement fund early and pay a penalty.

3. Set an asset allocation, and diversify

Asset allocation is an investor’s most important decision, said Bernstein. Research by numerous finance professors has shown that the vast majority of returns over time come from asset allocation rather than picking the right security or the right time to invest in the market.

One rough rule of thumb Bernstein uses for setting a stock-bond allocation is that your age should equal your bond allocation. A 50-50 or 60-40 split is a good starting point, he said, but then you need to figure out your risk tolerance and tweak your portfolio to reflect that.

4. Keep fees low

With many people expecting future stock market returns to be muted, it’s more important than ever to keep fees low. Situations in which a retirement saver gets conflicted advice—meaning an adviser gets fees and commissions if the client buys a particular product—lead to returns roughly 1 percentage point lower per year, according to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The council estimated the aggregate annual cost of conflicted advice on Superannuation assets at about $17 billion a year.

For most people, keeping investments simple is the most cost-effective strategy. Warren Buffett is a longtime fan of investing in low-cost index funds, and in his 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, Buffett shared the advice he gave to his estate’s trustee: 

5. Use a qualified adviser

Late-night television isn’t the place to find financial wisdom. 

6. Spend less than you earn

Spending more than they earn is a pattern for 23 percent of millennials and 19 percent of Gen Xers, according to a 2014 study by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s Investor Education Foundation. So it’s not surprising that only about a third of each demographic has an emergency fund in place.

Part of what can make it tough to build an emergency fund is lifestyle creep. As we (hopefully) earn more, we often ratchet up our spending—we upgrade phones or cars, or take fancier vacations—rather than increasing our superannuation  contributions by 1 percent, or setting a higher amount of savings to automatically be taken out of pay.

7. Maximise employee benefits

Ensure your KiwiSaver contributions match those of your employers.

Source: Bloomberg

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