When Eleanor Blayney retired from her successful financial planning practice in Virginia, she could not stop thinking about her women clients. She had really enjoyed working with them. For starters, they were so appreciative and rarely did they question the advice they were given. Women ask for, and follow, directions: that was an important difference.
At the same time, she was perplexed. Why, if these advisory relationships were so satisfying, did so few women – even women well able to afford the fees – seem ready to engage with a planner? She returned from giving a speech to women alumna from Mount Holyoke College, and was surprised to find how little these educated, professional women seemed to know about financial planning or planners.
She knew from her own life, and from those of her former female clients, that their planning issues were different from men’s and in many cases, more acute. Women lived longer, but they accumulated less wealth in the workplace. They suffered more often from disabilities and conditions requiring long term care. The probability was high that they would spend a significant period of their later lives alone.
What was blocking women from the financial planning they so needed? Women themselves will give all sorts of reasons for their reluctance to engage: it’s boring, I don’t have time, someone else takes care of my money, etc. etc. But two themes kept emerging: not only did many women believe they did not know enough about money, but money was frequently a source of fear and anxiety. In short, they did not want to talk about it.
As Eleanor was wondering how to help women overcome these barriers, the answers came to her in the form of two amazing women, both CFP®s and leaders of the financial planning profession.
Peg Downey, a former president of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, had focused her entire career on the financial education of women, first at the American Association of University Women, then at her own firm, Money Plans, in Maryland. Here was a woman who could answer to women’s need for more education, who knew how to speak to women, in new and creative ways that made personal finance relevant to their lives.
At the urging of Peg and other colleagues, Eleanor started talking to Elizabeth Jetton, a former president of the Financial Planning Association, a financial planning practitioner, and business coach. Elizabeth was the innovative leader who introduced the practice of circle governance to the FPA Board – a technique where participants share the responsibility of discovering the group’s collective wisdom. Eleanor herself had been thinking about the power of “circles” in women’s lives: sewing circles, quilting bees, giving circles, book clubs. Could circles also be used to educate and empower women about finance? Elizabeth, trained in circle facilitation and other hosting techniques, believed that this was possible.
The mission of Directions was created where the passions and interests of the women intersected: namely in the Empowerment, Education, and Engagement of women in the management of their finances. Women need competent, capable financial planners. But before engagement they need to be educated about personal finance. And before education, comes empowerment. Women need to feel safe, accepted, and respected when it comes to their money issues. They need to be talked to and advised in a different way.
There is so much work to be done to help women. Directions now exists to do it.
