Preparing for a New Financial Era: Women and Wealth

**Christine Kashkari** (0:07)
By 2050, women are expected to control most US financial assets. That shift matters for financial professionals and individual investors alike. In this episode, we'll discuss the critical pivot that providers, advisors, and plan sponsors need to make to better serve women and how families can have more productive conversations about wealth transfer across generations. Welcome to season two of Better Vantage by Vanguard, a podcast series hosted by custom content from WSJ and Vanguard.
I'm your host, Christine Kashkari, Editorial Director at WSJ Custom Programming, and I'd like to introduce my co-host in this series and our resident expert, Joe Davis, Global Chief Economist at Vanguard.

**Joe Davis** (0:52)
Christine, great to be here.

**Christine Kashkari** (0:53)
Great to see you again, Joe, even though you're outnumbered today.

**Joe Davis** (0:57)
Let's go.

**Christine Kashkari** (0:59)
Joining today to discuss how the financial concerns of women will reshape advisor practices and the behavior of families when it comes to investing is Fiona Greig, Global Head of Investor Research and Policy at Vanguard and Janel Jackson, Head of the Bank and Institutional for Financial Advisor Services at Vanguard. Janel, Fiona, welcome.

**Joe Davis** (1:20)
Great to be here.

**Janel Jackson** (1:21)
Thanks for having us.

**Joe Davis** (1:22)
We know what I'm really excited today, Christine. I mean, we're talking about just an historic wealth transfer in this country, over $120 trillion, five times US GDP. And so what I'm excited about is Fiona, some cutting edge research in terms of the analytics. And Janel, you work with advisors in the top advisor practices around the world. And so I look at this from two sides. So if you're in the audience, there's the women investor and the family side. There's also the advisor side. That's why I'm looking for it. So two sides, and then perhaps two dimensions, because maybe there's even some insights as a male, as a husband and a father, I could take away from too. So again, that's why I'm really excited about today's episode.

**Christine Kashkari** (2:01)
Fiona, you were with us in season one, where we were focused on the concept of the mass retirement of baby boomers, which acts as a catalyst for what we're talking about today, which is the historic wealth transfer, and who the majority of those assets are going to, women. So can you talk about why this is important, and what are the implications for that?

**Fiona Greig** (2:21)
Absolutely. Well, Joe, you hit it. I mean, $120 trillion worth of wealth is that sum of wealth that is going to transfer. It's going to transfer. Why? Because we have this baby boomer generation that is retiring. More people turned 65 last year than ever before.
And when that happens, if you think about a married couple, the woman has a 70 percent chance of outliving her husband. And if she does, she's going to live 10 years longer, a full decade.
So that means she's actually in the hot seat twice, right? So wealth transfers typically in two phases. First, from spouse to spouse. So from that man to his wife. And then second, from mother to child, adult children typically, right? Now, why this is so important, not just for families, but for the industry at large, is that there's a shocking statistic that 70 percent of widows change their financial advisor.
They weren't somehow in the conversation. I mean, I could not unhear that statistic when I first heard it. And so it tells us very clearly as an industry, that the status quo needs to change. It needs to change for women. And women are now in the protagonist seat for the family's financial story. That's why it matters.

**Christine Kashkari** (3:39)
Janel, are women ready for this? Can you talk about some of those issues that women uniquely face when they're building and preserving wealth?

**Janel Jackson** (3:49)
Yeah. As a woman answering the question, I want to say, heck yeah, we're ready. But I do feel like there are a lot of opportunities for women to take on a greater role in managing their portfolios. And if you think back to why we're all here and why we're having this conversation. So women's saving rates tend to be lower than men. Fiona's done a lot of great research on this. And that's due to things like changing careers, relocating due to a spouse's career, the role that they play in maybe taking a step back from their careers due to caregiving needs.
And we're seeing a lot of opportunities for advisors to play a bigger role in leaning in and helping women as they're thinking through opportunities to save and invest given some of these issues that have just prevailed. And markets have changed around women a lot.