I am starting this post partly as a distraction from a fabulous, black, wool Chanel skirt for which I nearly abdicated all of my financial maxims to purchase: no payments, no impulse purchases, no purchases that are not within my budget, nothing in excess... I could go on.  The path to financial irresponsibility is paved with beautiful, French, designer clothing.

By putting into writing my thoughts on personal finance, I hope to accomplish two goals.  The first is to keep myself accountable to the financial guidelines that I believe in through the introspection required by writing them down.  As the above Chanel-skirt-near-transgression should illustrate, my financial life is far from perfect.  My husband, Monsieur Financier, and I overspend on groceries; we eat out too much, and while we stay within our income, there is room for improvement.  I hope this serves as an ongoing reminder that there will always be more Chanel; there will not always be more money. 

The second reason is even more dear to me.

Around ten years old, I had saved my weekly allowance to the point where I had $60 in my little piggy bank.  I'm not a saver by nature, so it still surprises me that I had the determination at ten to save my allowance.  Ice cream truck drivers must have been on strike that summer.  While I may not be a saver by nature, I am most certainly a show-off.  Once I had laid out all of the crumpled bills and coins that I had stashes away and tallied up the number, I went directly to my parents to show off my fortune.  

My dad's response was to open up the newspaper and point me to the finance section.  I can still picture 100 individual stocks listed in the paper with the previous day's closing price.  There was Micron and US Bank, mainly companies of interest to the Idaho Statesman readership.  My dad (Grand-Pere Financier) walked me through my second lesson in personal finance: investing.  (The first was saving, apparently...)

Together, we picked out two stocks of interest to me: Ford (F) and First Security Bank (FSB, although no longer in business).  I gave my $60 to GP Financier, and he bought me one share of Ford and one of First Security Bank.  I was officially an investor.

Each morning, I would track the stock price, up and down and up and up and then down, calculating my gain or loss.  After a few months, I had made $20, or a 25% return, on my investment.  I was ecstatic with my success but also, a little tired of not being able to spend my hard-earned allowance, so I cashed out and pocketed $80.  And I was hooked.  Investing was an adventure with just enough risk and reward to make it intoxicating for life.

As I grew older and dabbled in a few shares of Starbucks and a few of FitBit, I began realizing how unique my ten-year old investing lesson had been.  I specifically remember sitting with a long-time family friend who had just married a kind, handsome, but financially uninformed man.  She was asking me questions that struck me as fairly basic: the different types of investments, what a 401k was, how much they should be saving for retirement, and on.  At the end of our conversation, I will never forget what she said, "My parents never taught me anything about personal finance.  They taught my brother because he's a man.  I guess they assumed I would marry someone who would be in charge of our finances, so I would never have to learn."  

Tragedy is what occurs when women assume that their partners will always be there to take charge of the finances.  And then life happens.  Divorce.  Death.  Disability.  Addiction.  I have seen women go from being a stay-at-home mom for 20 years to working full time when their husband came home one day at fifty-five and decided he didn't want to be married anymore.  I have seen women go from a stable, two-income family to becoming the sole bread-winner for four people when their spouse finds a late-life alcohol addiction that cripples his ability to contribute on a consistent basis.  Don't get me wrong; I'm not here to bash men.  Monsieur Financier is a stellar example of everything that is good and honorable.  BUT he may not always be around.  Assuming that he will be and not taking an active role in our family's personal finances would be a misstep of what could be epic proportions.

All of this is to say, I am burdened with the knowledge that not every woman is as lucky as I am to have a father who sat them down at ten years old and started teaching them about personal finance and how to win with money and to have a mother that exemplified what be a true partner in personal finance meant in a marriage.  The real tragedy would be to have gained this understanding and then refuse to share what I know.  Even if one woman reads this and has one better-informed discussion about money with those that matter in her life, this blog will be a success.

More to come.