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The Goddess Speaks
I must have whooped too loudly the day before Palm split from 3Com. With investors/speculators anticipating Palm's IPO, I watched my shares of 3Com take off, from $56.50 Feb. 4 to $119 March 1. For those can't follow any of this, I made $6,250 from this stock in less than a month. Girls just wanna
have fundsA co-worker wanted to know why I let out that whoop, and I told her. She told everyone else. This is the news business after all.
Typical female reaction: "Congratulations! You're rich! Now you can take us to dinner!"
Typical male reaction: "Great! What else do you own? Do you want a couple of tips?"
Most men are woefully unschooled in the wonders of a well-shaped handbag or the beauty of Prada ("Communist uniform" one said), but the guys do seem to have a better grasp on the money thing than women.
This is not uniformly so, of course. For every woman who can't remember which bills have gone unpaid, there's another who is a portfolio manager by day and balances her husband's checkbook at night. Still, I find it scary to know of women who neither save nor invest for their futures. Others feel "secure" allowing their husbands complete control over the family assets and finances. I find in all this a sense of denial, as if no misfortune will come their way if they don't think about it.
That is ridiculous. Horror stories abound about women whose husbands left or passed away, leaving family finances in shambles. And let's not forget the risk of job loss or illness.
Women live longer than men and must therefore save more to last through retirement. Yet women tend to earn less during the course of their work lives due to lower salaries and in many instances, taking time off for maternity and child-rearing reasons.
Investing is a way of putting each hard-earned dollar to work for you, though I know it's not easy to start. I lost a lot of money when I was younger by trusting others' "wisdom."
I learned to read business, do my own research and trust my own trendspotting instincts. Believe it or not, a sense of what people will be wearing three months down the line carries over to the business world if you realize that everyone will want Nokias and Palm Pilots or other such PDAs (personal digital assistants).
AS if waking up to the fact that some women need help taking charge of their finances, more authors are making it OK for women to think and talk about money. In "The Courage to Be Rich" (Riverhead Books), Suze Orman talks about the self-induced obstacles that prevent people from saving. In "A Girl Needs Cash" (Times Business/Random House), Joan Perry and Dolores Barclay dispel seven myths, including the "White Knight Myth" -- the idea that a man will take care of you -- and the "Market Savvy Myth" that presupposes a knowledge of calculus, a Ph.D. and a wad o' cash to have any shot at gains.
Start there, then read this newspaper's money section religiously. Explore the magazines: Money, Smart Money and Business Week are good places to start. One day you'll graduate to the Internet and Worth, the Vogue of the money mags. And don't give me the excuse that you can't afford any of this. Have you checked the public libraries?
As for 3Com, I perhaps should have listened to the women, cashed out and ran. I knew it would tank after the IPO, but it tanked to the point where I lost about $200 on paper. Yesterday, it had rallied back to 71+ on news of yet another spin-off.
It's quite a ride for the thrill-seekers among us. Of course, there are much safer ways to approach the market and the sooner the better. You're not getting any younger.
Nadine Kam is Star-Bulletin features editor.
The Goddess Speaks runs every Tuesday
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