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A Woman's Relationship to Money
Why It's Different Than a Man's
By Mary Kay Dirickson
Although only anecdotal evidence, Charlotte, N.C.-based Alliance Credit Counseling Inc.'s statistics are revealing. The percentage of divorced and widowed women who needed credit counseling was higher than their male counterparts in every age group. More than half of the women over 65 who needed help were divorced or widowed, while only 10 percent of men were in the same category. But women can make the arrival of their children an opportunity to get spending under control and make up for what they don't know about long-term planning and investments.
"When women become parents, they can use that as a way to step back and see what they are doing with money," Knuckey says. "You go from feeding two mouths on two incomes to feeding three or four mouths on one or one and a half incomes."
Wall says that many women sober up about money when they get pregnant. "Women's relationship to money does change when they have children," she says. "For a lot of women, that's when they become serious savers. Secondly, they often stop spending on themselves. They're spending on their children, and with so many cute things out there to buy, they are sometimes spending more."
Wall does say, however, that even with children, recreational spending isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as savings goals are still being met.
Bennett, now a single mother to her daughter, says her approach to money changed when she became pregnant, but her husband's didn't. If they didn't have enough money for milk and cheese, she would panic. At the same time, he often switched jobs and made decisions based on what he wanted, instead of what the family needed.
"I was definitely more responsible, which made being with someone who was irresponsible that much more difficult," Bennett says. "He thought I was obsessed with money, but I wasn't. I was obsessed with not having it."
