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Women need to know and anticipate the unique financial obstacles she will meet and how best to outsmart it. Without this anticipation early in their life the issues will keep compounding and it will overwhelm them before they can even understand and untangle them. The sooner they foresee these key issues the better they would be able to strategize, moderate and compensate for the impact.

The issues are:

1. Greater Responsibility. It is a well-known truism that female matured faster than male. Their brain could develop ten years earlier than the boys and this tend to draw parents to load them with greater roles and responsibilities. This coupled with the higher emotional quotient in female translate to more care and help for their siblings at home and similarly for colleagues and corporation at the workplace. This often means fewer saving for the female as they spend and sacrifice for others. This snowballed into the next unique issue for women.

2. Career and Income Inequality. The greater responsibilities and contribution do not translate to equal career or income equality. This truism and stark reality occur even in developed nation across almost all industries. This translates to lesser income annually and significant financial shortfalls in retirement planning. In global survey in 2020, women make only $0.81 for every dollar a man makes. This disparity of around 20% annually would translate to titanic difference in the long term – especially with the potential of compounded interest on investment.

3. Shorter time in the Workforce. These dire situations for most women are inflated by their shorter total career time in the workforce. This is contributed by a few factors including maternity, stop work to take on the role of primary care giver, and sacrificing career and opportunities as spouse goes on promotion or transfer, among others. It has a ripple effect from the amount of superannuation at retirement and reduced opportunities for advancement. In short, they are highly short-changed financially and the impact will be felt greatly from decade to decade as they aged.

4. Living Longer. Across the globe men often die earlier than women. Men can expect to live between 74-78 while women life expectancy is between 80 to 85. The gap of around 10 years during this twilight years could mean greater depletion or even negative retirement fund, notwithstanding the increasing cost of living. Unfortunately, this mean the last to go would bear the burden. Do not rely on inheritance benefits as it may come with unexpected financial cost. Be thankful if there are no debts to settle. 

Now that we had clearly learnt, recognize and anticipate these persistent realities we have the head start to strategize and negotiate these challenges. Read our next articles for the strategies and solutions.

After knowing the extensive and extended duration of the harsh issue women faces, they need to take concrete and proactive planning. There is no need for fear, blame or lament. Fortunately, there are practical solutions which women can access easily and leverage to reduce the impact, to subsequently enjoy financial abundance and independence. What is need is to embrace these 4 connected steps soonest possible.

1.    Start Financial Literacy. Financially literacy for women is slightly lower than man and this place woman in a disadvantaged position. Focus on specific financial worries and woes unique to women and not the entire range of financial themes and techniques. This would take a week of good readings and it would be enough to wake you from your slumber and start pondering on sound financial solutions. Next, do map out an outline of your goals at each phase of a woman’s life. You do not need to reinvent the wheels – the journey and milestones, challenges and goals are quite the same. What differs is the size and quality of your goals.

2.    Save and Invest promptly. Financial freedom began from knowing the correlation of financial stress, spending and savings. It is critical to defer and moderate unnecessary spending in return for financial security in the long run. Savings is the foundation but more critical is to know how one can invest to multiply savings – what we term as money@work. Next is to understand threats that could undermine and impact your current lifestyle, future goals and financial security and how all these threats can be mitigated via specific investment tools. These quick tips that you could master in a short time would jumpstart your financial dreams. 

3.    Partner a Financial Advisor. Leveraging the expertise and experience of a financial advisor is necessary to condense and accelerate your financial literacy, savings-invest strategies and outcomes. This is similar to having a personal fitness or health coach that will guide and provide all necessary resources and support. Spend some time to explore and establish such relationship and preferably with an experienced female financial advisor who could sympathize with your unique financial woes as a woman.

Most people assume having a personal financial advisor is expensive and reserve only for the rich and elite. In this global marketplace, technological simplicity and accessibility to information – having a personal financial advisor is no longer an expensive luxury but a common economic necessity. If you can afford a high end expensive mobile phone, that you need to change every five years, you certainly can acquire this lifetime investment that comes with multifunctional financial tools, auto reviews and upgrades, lifetime warranty and free financial apps at the lowest cost possible.

4.    Staying Focus. Financial planning for your life is a lifetime project but fortunately having a competent Financial Advisor helps to guide you smoothly and swiftly on this journey. Once you have established the above 3 key areas your responsibility is almost done. Next, would be staying focus in your job to grow your savings couple with sustaining your financial habits and promises with your financial advisor. Your financial tree can then grow solidly, steadily and securely. Just sit back and enjoy your family and leisure interest. Meanwhile, your financial advisor will be busy doing all the monitoring, growing your portfolio and updating you on the progress.

It suddenly sounds so simple and easy. Indeed, literacy can overcome illiteracy and all its woes quite easily. Initiating the financial literacy and acquiring a financial partner is the only milestone you need to reach to begin your financial freedom.

It is essential for young women to have financial planning or habits early in life along with her first income. This exposure and experience will allow for clearer priority and greater discipline over her income, expenses and goals in life. 

These valuable existential lessons will then allow her to continue defining and staying her financial grounds when she settles down with her partner. Progressing to a “me, you and us” approach will then be extension of her values and respect in the relationship. Of course, this is necessary as couples do have different investing styles, priorities and values. 

If uncertainties occur, divorce or become widowed, having a sound financial literacy and account in your name helps you to transit to a solo financial life again smoothly. 

1.   Financial Priority. There are two options in managing finance – you either prioritize expenditure or savings. If you prioritize expenditure then it is indulging in spending over careful savings. What is left at month end would be the savings – which will always be a case of insufficiency, indebt and insolvency, in a matter of time. 

If you prioritize savings you set aside 15%-20% for it and spend what is left. This nurture discipline and priority, creativity and resourcefulness. This also allows for short- and long-term planning. Within a year you can see how enriching and empowering these financial strategies are, and it gives you confidence and courage to pursue further financial goals and dreams. 

2.   Long Term Financial Goals.  You have to be clear of your goals in life as well as your post retirement standard of living. Remember, you need to feed two mouths with your income at any point in your life – that is, if you are single and with no dependents. First you need to feed yourself and your needs at the current moment for about 30 years till you retire. Next, you have to feed yourself and your needs when you retire without any income, again for another 30 years before your RIP. Most people forget about this reality – and it calls for prudent and disciplined planning.

If you are married – the ball game will be entirely different and difficult, and your prior experience of financial planning will be valuable.

3.   Investment.  The inherent values in women favour them in investment and this include patience, long term commitment and priority in education and health. Being a smart investor means you need to ensure the risks are distributed over a variety of instruments including high-risk equity and stable bonds coupled with a prudent measure of life insurance, real estate etc.

4.   Financial Advisor. It is always good to seek a competent and trusted financial advisor given that issues pertaining to finance can be extremely diverse and equally dynamic. Having a professional advisor ensure your long terms goals and interest are monitored and met while you focus on career, family and other important needs.

With the above in place, you bring to your relationship a set of values, commitment and assets that will earn the respect and support from your partner – which you will naturally reciprocate. On the other hand, your lack of financial literacy and experience will create a relationship of dependence, inequality and mistrust. 

There is a common saying in the financial sector – women save and men invest. There is a bucket of reasons for this and the irony is that women are more watchful of their savings then men – and their watchfulness becomes counter productive due to a lack of financial literacy. It is time women step forward and increase their net worth and bridge the huge gender retirement savings gap which is 46% (https://www.brinknews.com/the-gender-gap-in-retirement-savings-in-asean/). This means that women have 46% less savings than their male counterpart upon retirement. This is alarming because women live an average of 5 years more than man – translating to a need for higher retirement savings, which need to factor in the inflation rate. 

1.  Know the Power of Compounding Interest. Perhaps, women do not know what Einstein reportedly said “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it”.  This is a very powerful concept that women need to grasp.

2.  Financial Talk and Literacy. Women should participate and attend more chat, and gossip more about how to maximize their savings objectively. They could attend boot camps on money talk which will give them the necessary preview of specific financial constraints women faces and how best to start the journey to bridge it.

3.  Research and Options. It is critical, especially those who are analytical, to set aside a week or two to actually digest the investment dos-and-don’ts. This investment of time and research will be the foundation of your future financial wellness. There are plenty of DIY reading materials, and the best is to have a financial savvy person or a financial advisor to guide you along on the terminologies. There are only two major learning areas – risks and returns. Stay focus.

4.  Seek Women Partners.It is always good to have shared vision and values and this is extremely important as it is a long journey and you require support and sustainability. You could always find this in your clan or among your colleagues. All you need is a team of 3-5 headcount of the same age group. You can always share the cost of having professional tutoring from a competent and trusted female financial advisor.

All the above could be realized within a period of less than a month – and yet the potential benefits are extremely enriching and empowering. If you are keen do contact us to get started asap.

SKIW Managing Director, Ms Oo, initiated a CSR program along with support from family, friends and clients to offer food to the B40 community – during this very stressful period of Covid19 and MCO.

The first venture on Apr 20 was to a fishermen village of about 25 family in Tanjung Bungah. Also present are the political representative of the community who help us to identify the truly poor and needy.

The second venture on Apr 26 was to an Indian community in the Mt Erskine area, deep inside a Hockkien Cemetery ground, of about 50 family.

It was all smiles for them and it was a honor for us to be able to serve the less fortunate in this truly difficult time of Covid19 and MCO.

We wish to thanks all donors and community leaders who had contributed to this most fun, fabulous and fulfilling deeds. 

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All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words

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There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable.

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