Woman, Love Investing
“Investing” is something like a scare crow for women. They are scared to get near it and when mentioned, they don’t do much to cover up their feelings of hatred. In fact, they are quite honest to admit what an ugly job is investing. And just like everything else under the sun and beyond it, their feelings are not without reason...a very simple reason - the fear of the unknown.
As kids they saw their mothers’ involvement in anything money limited to domestic budgeting. Investing had something masculine about it and any sort of feminine intervention only made negative sense. So they obviously grew with the feeling that they had to keep away from something which by default belonged to men.
Then since recently, times changed and we found women treading the dreaded territories like Chartered Accountancy and financial planning. Yet a 39-year-old woman tells MoneyQuin that her husband and father-in-law told her to go and make tea for them when she asked them to explain mutual funds to her. Worse was that her husband had invested quite a huge part of her salary in MFs.
So we still have such rigid reactions to simple queries. Much is still left to change like women who are refused information can easily log on the internet and find all information there. Those who are not too familiar with the internet, can switch from soap operas to business channels and know everything they want to about investing.
Contrarily, there are young women who think
that if they invest money, they’ll be deprived of worldly pleasures at a young
age. So it’s better to have fun now and serious and boring stuff like investing
can come later.
Well, this is another aspect that most definitely has to change. A thousand or
two thousand bucks invested every month won’t dry your beer tanks really. And
it’s no Martian technology to understand investing these days. Like said above,
even if the men in your lives are orthodox and impose their beliefs about
masculinity of investing, you have the internet, TV and books handy.
Go for it. That’s a friendly bull out there and like all real men he too likes intelligent women with guts. If you are still scared of the bull, let your fund managers handle him for you. Learn and jump into mutual funds. It’s a safe way into the sea. You’ll learn to swim as you wade across.
