Over the following weeks, I will share several blog posts to give a glimpse inside my book, Divine Secrets of Affluent Women: The Guide to Owing Your Wealth. You can pre-order the Kindle version today, and the physical book will be ready on the official publication date July 31st! If you like to connect, you can reach me via email or connect with me on social: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
“I’m not good at math!”
Maybe you’ve said it or heard it before, but negative self-talk like this keeps you from achieving financial success. No one is born a numbers person. Women are born with the ability to do math. Getting the wrong answer in calculations does not mean that we are not genetically predisposed to be financial geniuses. Our problem solving or finance skills can improve with hard work and practice.
So many women today are hesitant to be accountable for money or think about wealth, which is detrimental to our financial stability. We find ways to avoid dealing with money. We are in debt with little savings and have no idea where our money is going. Our ignorance keeps us in a cycle of escalating poverty and debt.
At a young age, we are taught to be careful about money. Girls are taught to track spending, cut coupons, and save money while boys are taught to invest their money. As a result, women tend to leave 71percent of our money in cash[1] (which is low risk and low reward) instead of investing in the stock market. Or when they do invest, women are inclined to do so much later than men.
Not only do women live longer than men, but we also tend to be the primary family caregiver, spending multiple years taking care of elderly parents and children. In all likelihood, we have fewer earning years in the workforce, thus less time to build a nest egg and to save for retirement. At some stage in our lives, every woman will have the sole responsibility for their financial future.
Our society tells us lies that women are not good with money and that women are not good at math; therefore, we need to outsource handling money to our spouse and partners. As a result, our fate is undeniably tied because we have relinquished financial control to someone else.
The truth is that these lies hold us back from financial independence. If we want to get ahead financially, retire comfortably, and stop worrying about money, we need to take back control of our finances.
Unlike the women of her generation, I watched my mom take charge of her destiny.
When I was eight years old, my mom walked out on a failed marriage, left her home in Hong Kong, and took me and my three siblings — all of us under the age of ten — to a foreign country. She did not know anyone in the country, and she spoke very little English. Unfortunately, she took our family’s life savings and invested the money with men she didn’t know and on products that she did not understand. These men swindled all her money away, and my mother became a penniless single parent with four children to support.
I admired my mother’s courage and her financial independence to make her own decisions. She didn’t attend formal secondary school because her parents didn’t have the money. Yet, she has never been afraid to take risks.
I couldn’t protect my mom from losing her wealth, but I can help other women avoid the same mistakes. So I earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a Juris Doctorate in law from top universities and became an attorney. Early on in my career, I practiced family law — helping women obtain their fair share of the marital estate and fight for custody of their children. But something was missing. No matter how much money my clients acquired, it didn’t last.
I wanted to know why.
I sought out successful self-made affluent women who are financially independent and in charge of their own destiny because I realized they thought differently about wealth. I wanted to understand what and how women, like Indra Nooyi — the former CEO of Pepsi — and hundreds of others did differently and how I could apply their strategies to help more women build their wealth.
Indra Nooyi
Indra wasn’t born wealthy. But she did find a way to build wealth. She came to America at the age of twenty-three with only $50 in her pocket to attend graduate school in business administration. Forty years later, in 2018, she has a net worth of $80 million. She has also been listed at #1 on Fortune magazine’s list of Most Powerful Women in Business from 2006 to 2010.
Yet despite her tremendous achievement as the highest-ranking Indian-born woman in corporate America, Indra’s mom kept her grounded. In September of 2006, Indra rushed home to share the news that she had been appointed the president of PepsiCo, an iconic American company. Yet her mother refused to listen and ordered her to go and buy milk from the store. As a dutiful daughter, Indra brought the milk back. When she demanded to know why she had to buy the milk and not somebody else, her mother explained, “You might be the president of PepsiCo, and you might be on the board of directors, but when you enter this house, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, and you’re the mother. Nobody else can take that place. So leave that damn crown in the garage. And don’t bring it into the house.” Indra’s mom reminds us that even though we can afford to hire help to run errands, do the cooking and cleaning for our household, no matter how affluent we become, culturally, we still hold ourselves accountable as the mother to our children, wife to our husband, and daughter to our parents.
Can self-made affluent women have it all? What makes them different than countless other women in America? Is it luck, strategy, or a combination of both? Is their wealth due to their intellectual prowess or can less-gifted women achieve this too?
What I learned has changed my hope for the future of women.
I believe that women are born to prosper. Building wealth is a strategy and skill. You have to cultivate the path to financial wealth intentionally. Once you develop a wealthy mindset and follow the principles self-made affluent women use, you too will learn to be prosperous. No matter where you are in your life journey, you can build and rebuild your financial future now.
Many lessons learned by the women featured in the book didn’t come easy. It doesn’t matter if you are “afraid” of money, if you’re a woman in your twenties starting your adult-life, in your thirties going through transitions, in your forties balancing income across savings and spending, or in your fifties planning for your financial future, my hope is to pass these lessons and strategies along to ensure a stable financial future.*
My aim in writing this book is to show you strategies and not logistics. Without knowing your situation, I can only give you checklists and general information but not financial or legal advice. You should always consult an attorney and/or a certified financial planner for official guidance. I truly believe that these time-tested strategies will bring you closer to financial independence. Together, we will create a world where women are financially fearless.
[1] Maya Salam, “Money Is Not Just For Men,” Her Words, New York Times, June 14, 2019.