This book review exists thanks to former AAII finance writer Matt Bajkowski who fished “Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich” by Lois Frankel, Ph.D., out of a bargain bin for $1, handed it to me and said, “For the blog!” The first thing to know about this book is it was published in 2005, so it’s full of antiquated advice—much of it geared toward married women. However, I thought it would still be a helpful exercise to see what was being touted to women in the early 2000s and if I could learn anything new that I haven’t from the many other finance books that now exist by women, for women.
Frankel covers women and wealth, getting in the money game, taking charge of your financial life, spending your money wisely, learning money basics, saving and investing for future wealth, maximizing your financial potential at work and playing it smart with your money. Chapter one encourages women to define what “rich” means to them. Frankel believes that women are given conflicting messages about money: We are told to spend wisely and save what we can but also be nurturing and helpful to others, creating a “double bind.” To get us out of this double standard, she points out another, “Whereas a woman may be called a ‘rich bitch,’ there are no similarly pejorative terms to describe a man.”
A table in the book presents the differences between how men and women use money. According to the table, men use money to prepare for the future, while women use money to create a lifestyle in the present. Likewise, men ask for “what they want” but women ask for “what they think they deserve.” Though these are a bit absolutist and don’t apply to everyone, I personally think this moment from Mad Men shows the difference even better!
The first chapter also has a self-assessment to determine where you are at on your personal finance journey. Each statement fits into a category that corresponds to a chapter of the book. For instance, #9 is part of the “taking charge of your financial life” category: “I have a plan in place for how to survive financially if something catastrophic were to happen (sudden loss of a job, loss of a spouse or partner, etc.).” Adding up the true statements in each category leads to a total score. My score of 24 landed me in the middle: “You’ve made a good start, but you’re nowhere near the finish line. Focus on those areas where you still have difficulty with becoming financially independent. You’ll find that small changes pay big dividends.”
I guess by 2005 standards, I’m slacking in the personal finance department (probably because I don’t balance my checkbook!). But I’d say a lot has changed since then, even if the low-rise jeans have cycled back into rotation. My higher scores in the “spending your money wisely” and “saving and investing for future wealth” categories signal that I’m on the right track.
It wouldn’t be an early 2000s book without a whisper of “the media” that was beginning to take over our lives. Frankel’s “Sex and the City” reference was a welcome surprise, “If you were to be the media’s ideal representation of the perfect woman, you would be thin, blond, and twenty-five. Kind of like the women on Sex and the City. The only stock you would own would be a ‘stockpile’ of Manolo Blahnik shoes!”
Speaking of women and bad spending habits, the chapter about spending your money wisely has pages upon pages covering the same problem in different fonts: “emotionally driven purchases,” “impulse buying” and “guilt shopping trips.” It almost reads like her publisher wanted her to fill out this chapter with more mistakes women were making to make us all feel worse about ourselves! We have a lot more clarity now around the way women spend money, which practically stimulates the entire economy. Women using their money to create a lifestyle in the present doesn’t have to be a bad thing for personal finance, it just needs to be balanced out with more of an eye on the future.
The discussion I found most fruitful was around giving and how women are taught to avoid being greedy: “Ask yourself whether you have what you want, what you deserve, and what others have. If the word greedy comes to mind, exorcise it from your vocabulary. Women who worry that they’re just being greedy are usually the last ones who should be worrying about it. Greedy people don’t think of themselves as greedy. They simply insist on receiving everything they think is due them—which is usually more than they deserve in actuality, and that’s why we call them greedy!”
As a chronic overthinker who has been told “Wow, you think about a lot of things,” I like to apply this lesson to other aspects of my life. If I’m consciously thinking about something, it means I care about it and I’m willing to allocate my own precious time and brainpower to it. On the flip side, it means that someone who doesn’t think about those things probably doesn’t care or doesn’t have the capacity to handle them. In terms of money, this would mean they are blindly taking advantage of a system that already works for them—they never had to think twice (or even once!).
As a Jewish woman, Frankel also discusses tzedakah and using money to do good: “I’m a huge believer in sharing one’s wealth—whether it’s a wealth of time, money, or resources. In fact, in Jewish households there’s often something called a tzedakah—a small box into which you put money for the less fortunate. Interestingly, the word tzedakah is the Hebrew term for charity … meaning justice or fairness. So it’s not necessarily true that you share money because you are altruistic; rather, you feel it’s the right or just thing to do.”
Despite the overload of anti-shopping advice and some old URLs that no longer go anywhere, I enjoyed seeing how all of Frankel’s ideas fit together. “Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich” emphasizes the importance of financial thinking for women to address the causes instead of the symptoms, but it leans heavily on the idea that women can be rich if they just act a little more like men. I’ve read enough books that discount this idea entirely, so I don’t want to put too much anachronistic pressure on the book itself. If it weren’t for this book and Frankel’s work, women wouldn’t have had this stepping stone to get where we are today in the world of money.
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