“For the novice, it’s really intimidating,” said Pamela Sams, a financial advisor in Herndon, Virginia, who hosts regular group meetings for women like Packard who want to better manage their finances and investments.“I’ll see a word I don’t know, so I look it up. But then there’s another word I don’t understand. Suddenly I’m four definitions deep, and I’m tired and discouraged,” she said. “I wanted to be among women.”“Women need a safe space to really find out about these things,” she said.
True and Packard are far from alone: only 27% of women feel their education prepared them to manage their own finances , according to the Acorns study. “Not that there’s any real chance of loss, but it’s such a large quantity of money!” she said. “So I feel overly cautious.”While this attitude can actually make them better investors – women outperformed men by 0.4 percentage points, in a Fidelity client data analysis for instance – it can also be what holds them back.While Handler is starting relatively early, a reluctance to invest can have heavy costs.