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Whatever your income level is, save as much as you can - up to 20 percent, but more if you can - and invest it. Put that into an IRA; put that into a brokerage account.
What I saw a thousand times during the downturn was, 'We'd like to give her that opportunity, but we need to go with the sure thing - we can't afford diversity right now,'
Investing isn't a game to be won. At the end of the day, it's a way to achieve your big goals, like buying that home, starting that business, and retiring on your own terms.
Leadership is a lot of hard work. I hoped, when I was younger, that I would just be a natural leader or that it was something that was innate, but it is really a learned skill.
My kindest interpretation of my younger self is, 'Boy, was I busy.' I had two kids, a husband, two stepkids. I mean, how many darn things can a person do at the end of the day?
I had very good bosses, very good companies for which I worked. I worked in industries where the results really mattered; it wasn't the perception of results, it was just the facts.
The only time in my career I've lost sleep - wake up 3:30 in the morning, and you know you're not going back to sleep - is when I've been an entrepreneur. Even in the financial crisis.
Assume the best intent in others around you. You will often be right, and even when you're not, people can rise to your view of them. Not always, but enough that I believe it's worth it.
Albert Einstein is reported to have said compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Obviously, a dollar invested in your 20s is worth so much more than a dollar invested in your 60s.
You may find it more relaxing to work with people just like you, but entrepreneurship is about finding new approaches to problems, and discomfort can be an important part of that process.
If you don't share information among your startup's team, then it'll be just about a coincidence if product, marketing, and engineering are ever aligned. Those odds are too low to succeed.
I never really considered myself much of a feminist until I left Wall Street. I did all the right things - such as put together gender-diverse teams - but feminism wasn't deep in my bones.
Fundraisers treat men completely differently than women. As a matter of fact, many of them have the default on their direct mail set up to read "Mister," and it really rankles a lot of women.
I can tell you that my experience has been that the gentlemen are more likely to come and ask for the order, ask for the raise, ask for the promotion, and that the women are less likely to do so.
The 'aha' moment came one to me one morning when I was applying my mascara, and I realized that the retirement crisis is actually a woman's crisis: Women live longer than men yet retire with less money.
Like many entrepreneurs, I never have two days that are alike. One thing that's consistent is I wake up early, around 4:30 A.M. It's my most productive time of day because I can think and work uninterrupted.
On Wall Street, the industry in which I grew up, a culture in which 'my word is my bond' shifted over the past few decades toward one where the big print can say 'Free' while the small print gives the real costs.
I'm about impact. One can make impact if they run a big business with a lot of zeroes. I've done that. One can also make an impact when you're a research analyst, where it's you and your associate. I've done that.
Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.
The truth is, if you are a woman saving 10% of your income for retirement, and you put it in the bank account, your chances of retiring well - living on 90% of your pre-retirement income for your full life - is 0%.
I was lucky. My children didn't have health issues, didn't have big school problems, etc. And as I watched some of my peers go through this, you can see how quickly a family can get derailed when they are not lucky.
You know those days at the office when you used to come in and not really do much? You don't get days like that as an entrepreneur. If you don't do the work you need to, nothing happens that needs to. It's that simple.
Starting a business from scratch and having little money in the bank focuses your mind in a way that running a multibillion-dollar business never does. It brings the key drivers of performance into sharp relief. I promise.
You have six math Ph.D. Caucasian gentlemen from the Northeast of the country, great. You put one more in the mix, you haven't added much. It's only when you add something different that you really are able to accomplish more.
Women tend to live longer than men do. Women tend to have, unfortunately, their salaries peaked sooner than men's do. Both of these things are extraordinarily important in putting together financial and investing plans for women.
Women tend to have a better track record in investing - when they invest - than men do, because they tend to take a longer-term perspective. They tend to trade less. They tend to shift in and out of stocks or mutual funds less often.
Recognize that the issues we face as women advancing in business are issues my grandmother would have loved to have had. And fight the good fight nonetheless. For yourself and your peers - but also for your daughter, when it's her turn.
If a woman is making $85,000 a year, putting aside 20% of her income, putting it in a bank, earning very little...Over the course of her life vs. investing, this can cost her $1.5 million, $2 million, $2.5 million. Life changing amounts.
We all know money is power. And women won't be equal with men until we are financially equal with men. Getting more money into the hands of women is good for women, but it's also good for their families, for the economy, and for society.
How about mandated parental leave.? Oh, okay. Less than 20% of companies in America have it. Most of them think about it as an expense. What's the bigger expense? The bigger expense occurs if women have babies and don't come back to work.
What you hear and what the research shows is that gentlemen negotiate for their first job. Women do not negotiate from their first job and on. And I tell women there is no H.R. fairy godmother. There might be, but you better not count on it.
If you are a senior woman in business, you intuitively know two things: If a white man promotes a woman or a person of color, he gets credit for it. If a woman says great things about a woman, you get dinged for it. Research is clear on this.
Men tend to leave their financial adviser at a single-digit-percent rate in any given year. And women leave their husband and their joint financial adviser in the year after their spouse's death at a rate of greater than 70 percent - seven-zero.
First, pay off your high-interest-rate debt. If you have student loan debt - that's low interest rate; that has a tax benefit - you can leave that out. A mortgage can be an OK one. Credit card debt is poison. That needs to be paid off right away.
As an entrepreneur, I've learned how crucial it is to be able to call a spade a spade and avoid falling in love with a particular strategy or product. Instead, you need to let the customer tell you what she needs - and to change her as she changes.
The research indicates that when we women invest, we women do tend to be more patient, take a longer-term perspective and as a result of it, tend to be better investors than men. But the messages we get are that investing is sort of 'the guys' world.'
My advice for folks on networking is give, give, give. You will later receive. But you are really planting these seeds. Some of them will die, and they won't become anything. Many of them will take many, many years before they pay off for you if at all.
Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.
I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.
To empower women, power must be given to them, presumably by an entity that already has it. And that entity is the patriarchy. This also implies that women must be on the receiving end, waiting - politely - to be empowered. Very Victorian-era courtship, isn't it?
Facts are that the financial advisers on Wall Street today or anywhere depending on which firm, what point in time - 85 to 88 percent male, and that is part of why investing for women they tell us feels unapproachable because they don't see people who look like them.
I have a very simple point of view, which is, I'm going to be alive for some amount of time; I don't know how long that's going to be. Then I'm going to be dead for a really, really long time. Right? You need to squeeze everything you can out of this time when you're alive.
My low point was after being reorganized out of running Merrill Lynch. That dismissal deeply contradicted my sense of fairness, since, at the time, my team and I had done what we were brought in to do: We had turned Merrill Lynch around from the depths of the financial crisis.
We haven't always been aware of it, but the 'locker-room bro talk' has long been going on not just in locker rooms but in some corporate conference rooms. Of course, not by all men. But by some - including some who hold positions of power. And that matters in holding women back.
One thing I never thought about in my big-company job? Cash flow. When your business has billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and you can find yourself in real jeopardy fast.
In terms of challenges, I think finding the right people to maximize the chances the business will succeed is the hardest thing. You can crunch the numbers any way you want, but at the end of the day, you really need good employees and investors - and they aren't always easy to find.
The Ellevest target client is the professional woman who either has her own money or has agency over her family's money. She is among the 75 million women in the U.S. workforce who want to take financial control and is looking for a straightforward way to achieve her dreams on her own terms.
One of my passions is women in business and helping women to get ahead in business. For women, that feedback loop can be broken. Women won't get as much feedback from male bosses as men will get. Therefore, they have to make an extra effort, whether that is unfortunate, good, bad, indifferent.
If a woman waits 10 years to invest, "I'm busy", "I've got to do this", "I can put it off", "I gotta find the right financial..." It costs her $100 a day. $100 a day! And if we had money falling out of her pocketbook at the rate of $100 a day, we'd change our pocketbook; we'd fix our pocketbook.
The industry financial advisers, on average about 85% male, tends to be a more mature financial adviser - so I think in their 50s, really. For so many companies, in their 60s. In fact, there is one company that was telling me they had more financial advisers over the age of 80 than under the age of 30.