A Purse of Your Own: An Easy Guide to Financial Security - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Deborah Owens is a 20-year veteran and former vice president in the financial services industry. She is the CEO of Owens Media Group, which creates financial empowerment content for the web, print, radio and TV.  She is a sought after speaker on the topic of financial empowerment and entrepreneurship and has toured nationally with TD Jakes Enterprises, Working Mother Media, and the NASD.  The Power of the Purse  Tour begins in 2010 with the mission of engaging, enlightening and equipping one million women to become financial empowered by forming Purseonal Support Groups.  For more information visit www.deborahowens.com.

Brenda Lane Richardson, an award-winning journalist and active public speaker, is the author of seven nonfiction books and Chesapeake Song, a novel.

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A PURSE OF YOUR OWN

USING YOUR PURSE FOR PROTECTION

THE INCIDENT IS SAID TO HAVE OCCURRED ON A rain-soaked road near Dallas. Four older women were riding in an Impala when a vehicle sped through a red light and smashed into them, the impact sending their car spinning. Although clearly at fault, the other driver, a male, climbed out and approached with his hands thrown up, as if to say that he’d had it with women drivers. If this man hoped to intimidate these “little old ladies,” his plan backfired.

The Impala’s driver rolled down her window and when the man said something that made her feel threatened, she blasted him with pepper spray and jabbed him with an umbrella. According to an eyewitness, the women then climbed from their car and hit him with their purses until he fled for safety.

Admittedly, I have a different kind of protection in mind when I travel the country to speak about A Purse of Your Own or talk to listeners who call into Wealthy Lifestyles, my financial show on WEAA 88.9 FM, an NPR-affiliate station in Baltimore. But the idea of women banding together to become active participants in their own lives—in this case, clobbering a bully with their purses—offers an indelible image for a concept that I teach about how the purse can provide protection.

The purse of your own message has been especially welcome since 2008, when the world economy has seemed in free fall and millions have panicked as they watched their nest eggs and retirement funds shrink dramatically. These are the times when novices want to know how to hang on to their purses.

The financial meltdown that began in 2007 was caused by people leading what I call “unwealthy lifestyles.” Too much house furnished with multiple mortgage refinancing, and too much credit card use with ever-increasing interest rate terms. Those same exotic mortgages were then packaged into investment securities that Wall Street sold all over the world, which eventually turned into toxic waste on the balance sheets of icons in the financial industry such as American Insurance Group (AIG) and Merrill Lynch. The real estate bubble bursting impacted the financial system in ways no one could have imagined, and at this writing caused the stock market to lose more than half its worth in less than twelve months. As a result, people have become more averse to investing. But as the dust clears, you can be sure that new fortunes will be made. And why shouldn’t yours be one of them? Investing remains the best long-term vehicle for acquiring wealth.

Women in my audiences may be fainthearted, but they are comforted by the symbol of the purse, an accessory that is near and dear. They seem to get my message right away when I say that the financial sector became lopsided, with way too much debt and too little real wealth, like a purse weighed down by thousands of pennies. Purse is all about restoring equilibrium and creating financially and emotionally balanced investors.

I use the purse as a metaphor for wealth because it dates back to antiquity when it represented a woman’s dowry, her family’s way of making certain that she was entering a relationship with recognized assets. Today, when so many of us call the shots about our own lives, the purse speaks to our financial state of mind. A full purse can provide opportunities for leaving a bruising relationship; an empty one may mean having to stay and suffer more.

The purse has long been a reflection of our economic power. When husbands controlled the assets of Victorian women, the purse was dainty, designed for carrying calling cards and hankies. During World War II, as women took over nontraditional “Rosie the Riveter” jobs, sturdier purses became fashionable. At war’s end, when soldiers returned to the States and the workplace, women were again relegated to the home and purses dwindled in size.

Now, as if mirroring our move into the highest corridors of power, purses are built to accommodate everything from wallets, checkbooks, calculators, cell phones, and corporate reports to lipstick, earrings, tissues, and baby’s emergency diaper and wipes. Today’s purses seem to represent all the possibilities in our lives.

Whether you carry a designer knockoff or a high-priced object of impulse and lust, a purse is probably your most intimate accessory. If you can’t locate it, your heart races; alone on a dark street, you clutch it beneath an arm. And no matter how much you love someone, if that person rifles through our purse, you feel violated. There is deep sympathetic meaning to be found in our purses. More than a simple repository for objects, they are extensions of who we are. Freud interpreted the purse as female genitalia, but that was a nineteenth-century man’s explanation. More than anything, the purse represents our private financial identity. At the end of the day, creating wealth is about adding to the purse.

For the most part, purses have remained quintessentially female. One manufacturer tried popularizing the use of “man bags” for guys, but the idea never really caught on. In the United States, in particular, men largely view purses as girly girl, and that’s all right with me. I like the idea of having a financial identity that is distinctly female, like this investment guide. A Purse of Your Own accentuates investment strategies for building wealth based on our unique mélange of strengths, whatever that means for you as an individual. This work capitalizes on interests that include friendships, parenting, romance, dieting, and shopping.

Do those subjects sound familiar? That’s right, ladies, I’m throwing down the gauntlet and embracing what’s nearest and dearest to our hearts. From this point on, the purse stops here. I’m sick of hearing that we’ve got to act like one of the guys to get ahead financially. That certainly hasn’t been the case for two of the richest women on the planet, J. K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame and entertainment powerhouse Oprah Winfrey. And you’ve got to wonder what Winfrey and Rowling know that others don’t.

Rowling was distraught after her marriage ended. She might have been written off as “too emotional” and too “clingy,” except she used her understanding of the universal need to feel loved to write Harry Potter into the world history of literature. Winfrey, among the first to insist that friendships between women matter, built an entertainment empire by using the alchemy of her body, mind, and spirit to make us feel that’s she’s right there with us when we need her guidance, laughter, knowledge, and inspiration—as a BFF should be.

It’s as if Rowling and Winfrey were listening to Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration speech when he reminded the world that humans are powerful beyond measure and that it is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. Rowling and Winfrey understand that the feminine spirit illuminates the world. These women are not afraid to let their lights shine.

Rowling and Winfrey exemplify generosity, creativity, and a desire for relationships—all of which are considered “feminine” characteristics. At the same time, they’re also ambitious, analytical, and fearless, traits many considered “masculine.” By...