Investing — What men and Women can Learn from Each Other

No matter how you slice things men and women are different.  We by nature enjoy different activities and interact with each other differently.  If you want a good example just watch children play.  Boys turn things into monsters, aliens, and guns while girls prefer dolls, princesses, and houses.  This fundamental difference also shows up in the way we invest our money.

Men tend to be risk takers.  We shift our money here and there trying to catch the next great investment.  The advantage to this strategy is that we can hit it big now and then and make a good profit on our investments.  The downside is that we can end up on the downside of a lot of financial bubbles.  Missing the best opportunities that we didn't know were coming.  I relate this to a surfer who moves quickly from beach to beach.  Sure he catches a wave here and there but because he is always on the move he misses the big ones.

Using this same analogy women are more like the sun bather sitting on the shore.  By nature most women are risk averse when it comes to investing, and life in general.  A large percentage of women put their money in CD's and other very safe investments.  These investments just sit there gaining interest but barely keeping up with inflation so they never see the downs but they also never see the "crest of the wave."

Using these generalizations, if a man and a woman made the same amount of money over their working lifetime the man comes out slightly ahead of the woman at retirement.  Taking into account that women live longer than men (we won't discuss why but insert your joke here) this means women have less to live on for a longer period of time.  What we really need is to learn from each other.

Men need to find a sweet piece of water and stay there.  Ride the waves when they come in and patiently wait for them to return when the tide goes out.  Women, on the other hand, need to get a surfboard and get in the water.  By men being a little more conservative and women taking a little more risk we can catch the waves together and surf our way to financial prosperity.