Women and money - fools soon parted

OPINION: Westpac has another survey for International Women's Day on Thursday, showing women are inept at financial planning.

Many are suggesting a man is not a financial plan.

They would be correct and incorrect.

Women often run the household budgets.

The problem with this is that women think this is all financial planning is, paying for groceries and kiddies after school activities.

They cannot grasp what would happen if the mighty three stumped totara ceased magically dropping $50 notes from his branches into their hands.

Unless you actually earn the money you are spending you cannot grasp quite what discipline is required to earn, accumulate and keep wealth.

It isn't that easy. Neither is growing that money. Handing it over to a financial advisor and crying when it is lost isn't a plan either. You cannot contract out your own financial future.

While romantics over-dramatise the importance of how women may know how much a litre of milk costs, most women simply have no idea how much work is required to earn that bottle of milk.

Doing a few chores around the house and looking after kids can never be equated to the lifetime of skill accumulation and difficulty in earning that six figure salary.

The actual effort that went into buying that BMW X5, million dollar home in the suburbs or those private school fees I can tell you right now would shock most women into a right state of exhaustion.

For a start you don't just land a job that allows that sort of wealth, the skills required in that job are acquired and being built as far back as primary school.

I know women who are in charge of several hundred thousand dollars of their husband's income.

The husband lets them have this freedom as they make so much money and think they always will that they don't really care how it is spent. It is an exercise to stop the incessant whinging women seem capable of in order to demand as much material gumf as the neighbours and school chums of their kiddies.

These women treat it as their own money but without realising how hard it is to make that sort of income and are hopeless at saving even their portion. They spend it all because they show no respect to money. If a divorce comes they are used to an endless income stream and spending it all. It all comes as a bit of a shock to the wee dears.

Young working women are earning good money these days as long as they didn't choose to do an utterly impractical worthless University degree. Even before they opt in and out of the workforce and have babies their spending and savings habits can be analysed and most are appalling. Sales and marketing promo girls are the worst. Many earn $80-100,000 a year from a young age but spend $81-101,000 a year. Then cry they cannot afford a house.

What makes it worse is this example where a woman has diligently saved $400,000 yet cannot buy a house in Auckland with cash as banks have loaned over the years more money to idiots who can't save or really afford a house in the first instance creating a seemingly never-ending bubble.

Young people look at this example and would snigger as to what was the point of her saving that in the first place when you can go to the bank and receive debt.

One observation I find is that women seem to spend what their friends spend and as poverty is a disease you can catch if you get too close to it, we tend to assimilate with the same kind. Without realising a) everyone lies about their income - either over or understating, and b) no one knows what wealth others have stored or inherited away from Mummy and Daddy.

Another observation is women have this set x$ in their budget make-believe which beyond they say they cannot afford something. Well, unless it is paid for by someone else then they are happy to participate.

I have never listened to the utter twaddle spoken about income and spending from other people. This selective hearing and eye-rolling has served me well.

Financial planning is about stripping away your entire life's relationships and worrying solely about yourself. Something I have years of gloriously selfish experience in. Knowing you have to fund your own lifestyle brings you an immediate sense of perspective on how wealthy you really are and how much you can spend.

Many women back themselves in their 20's to get a wealthier partner so don't worry about planning their spending accordingly. Some succeed, but even then many by their late 30's or early 40's wish they'd applied a better perspective to just how well off they are when really it was just how well off their partner is.

On the flipside I've found an atrocious amount of successful intelligent young women in New Zealand paying for men. Now men have been doing this for decades but it has always been with the proviso that the women is at least pleasant to them and does ... well....something like cook or clean. Many of these men bludging now off women are sloths and don't even take out the rubbish.

Cheered on by men promoting the "man drought" myth, these women are having their bank balances sucked dry today by men. The best sort of financial planning these women could ask for is a new partner.

Another trend is for younger women to pay for older men....and their former families. Something bordering on criminal but what puts it over the edge is these younger women aren't earning high six figure salaries where it doesn't hurt, they are usually far too nice women on very average sorts of incomes.

In effect they are financing the ex wife and SOCK (some other c---- kids). Something we just do not do. Ever. It doesn't give you control over the ex wife. She is LAUGHING at you. Her friends are LAUGHING at you.

In Bill Ralston's latest column he drags up the old age half plus seven I talked of in analysing the stupidity of funding for a study of zebrafish. The half plus seven isn't new but Bill mentions my reasoning. Men need seven years to recover the half that their former wife ran off with.

Problem is in that seven years the ex is living the sort of lifestyle she's always had without the three stumped totara dropping notes off the branches.

And that's why women are bad at financial planning.

They haven't been the ones actually leaving the comfort of their home and earning the money. So don't realise that one day.

It.
All.
Can.
Stop. 

Cathy Odgers is a Hong Kong-based tax lawyer. She blogs as Cactus Kate.