An excerpt from I’m On My Own, And So Are You

Time is tight. Mine, for sure. Yours, too, I’d bet.

So I write the way I talk: straight.

My theory: You can get sweet talk and a sales pitch in a great many places.

It’s harder to find tough love and empathy.

Here’s how my book begins, with blunt facts and home truths — and an explanation of my commitment to women.

Prince Charming hit the road sometime back in the 1950s.

The world of business isn’t a fair place.

Total dependence on others can be dangerous to your health and your wealth.

Only you are responsible for your own financial security.

It’s not that the times are changing. The times have already changed. Women no longer spend all their lives at home. Men no longer go out and make all the money.

The bottom line is that there isn’t a single person out there who can truly guarantee any woman her own financial security — except herself.

This means that if you’re married, you must educate yourself financially, even if your partner is making money for both of you. If you’re living with someone, you must do the same. And if you’re earning your own money, you still have to educate yourself, because your paycheck only supports you today — it’s what you save and invest that supports you tomorrow. Ignoring the issues doesn’t work, not if you want to end up self-sufficient and secure; not if you want to avoid pushing a shopping cart down the block.

Hear me again. There is one basic economic fact of life with which you must come to terms: You, and only you, are responsible for your own economic survival.

That’s right. Not your husband. Not your business partner. Not your father. Not your family. You. So if you haven’t already done so, it’s time to get your economic act together and take charge of your money.

But alongside these dire warnings comes good news. I can help you learn to take care of your finances. I can teach you how to feel more secure. I can help you put aside your fears about the subject of money. I can help because I had to learn how to take care of myself the hard way — all by myself. It was a tough, sad and lonely road. But this is part of what makes my information valuable. As a friend said to me, “Judy, you have an incredible, painful story. So do a lot of women. The difference is that yours has a positive result.”

As you will see, I went from losing my health, my money, and most of my adult family to becoming a highly successful entrepreneur. But the best part of my story isn’t the money I’ve made, the car I drive, or the presents I can buy. The best part is that I can wake up every morning, look at myself in the mirror, and be totally confident that I know how to take care of those I love the most, including myself.

How do you know if you’re taking good care of your own wealth?

For starters, ask yourself these questions:

Do I have enough money if I get divorced or lose my significant other?

Do I have enough money if I become sick or become disabled?

Do I have enough money if I lose my job or my earnings drop?

Do I have enough money if I decide to start my own business?

Do I have enough money to retire on?

Do I take care of my money as I would any other major responsibility in my life?

You probably answered “no” or “I don’t know” to at least some of these questions. Most women do, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. That’s just the way it’s always been. Too many women aren’t ready to make important financial decisions, or they fail to understand the consequences of the decisions they’ve already made — or that were made for them. In my case, I was over 40 before I paid any attention to these decisions. Until then the men in my life made every one of them for me.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Years ago, when my ex-husband told me to stay at home and clean, I obeyed him without a whimper. Then, thanks in part to the women’s movement, I learned to break through barriers that had seemed impenetrable. Today, I’d tell any man who wanted me to stay home that we should hire a housekeeper because I work as hard as he does. (Maybe harder.) My father used to say, “Judy, you’re so smart, I only wish you’d been a son.” He meant it as a compliment. If he were alive today, I’d ask him to show me his profit and loss statement so I could help him manage his affairs more efficiently.

Women are mothers and merchants, homemakers and heart surgeons, daughters and dentists, executives’ wives and executives. Many of us are juggling dual roles. We have more money, we’re working longer, we’re living longer. In New York, the number of women who own their businesses has increased 58% since 1997 — that’s 150% above the national average. Those women-owned firms in New York produce 4% of revenue and 6% of employment in the state.

And New York is only third in the ranking of businesses owned by women. Nationwide, women own 8.1 million businesses. They produce revenues of $1.3 trillion and create 7.7 million jobs. (One reason that women start their own businesses: According to 2005 figures, 46.5% of all jobs were taken by women, but only 8% were executives. At Fortune 500 firms, less than half had more than three women working as top managers, and only eight had a female CEO.)

For me, here’s the key statistic: Women constitute 35 per cent of the country’s 51 million owners of stocks and stock mutual funds.

But if we’ve become experts at doing everything that’s expected of us — and more — we still haven’t fully penetrated the world of finance, nor have we learned how to build our net worth.

That fact continued to gnaw at me, even as my own career prospered. I was burning with ambition to do more. I didn’t know exactly what that was, however, until a few years ago, when my friend Stuart asked me if I would talk to a friend of his who was suffering from terrible financial advice.

It turned out that Maureen had been married to an extremely unpleasant man who was so manipulative that, despite being dead, he was still controlling her from beyond the grave. After their divorce, the husband arranged their settlement in such a way that, whenever Maureen needed money, she had to petition a trust for funds. And when he died, he left the estate in charge of the money, rather than his wife. The trustees’ brokers then placed Maureen’s money into mutual funds. Although the funds were decent, they didn’t serve her purpose — the brokerage firm never took the time to read the trust agreements.

The husband had tied things up so that Maureen was allowed to withdraw only interest income — she wasn’t permitted to take out any capital gains or dividends. Since the mutual funds paid only dividends, and most of her investments were in stocks, not bonds, she wasn’t earning interest, the one thing she really needed.

Thanks to someone else’s incompetence, Maureen became a cash-poor millionaire.

I told her all this and, with a little work, we were able to establish a better portfolio.

But the situation infuriated me.

“Look at how badly women get treated,” I told the man who was then my business partner.

“That’s just life,” he replied.

“It’s easy for a man to say that,” I said, “because it’s not a man’s thing. It’s women who are always being set up for this kind of predicament.”

I couldn’t stop. “That broker saw big commissions when he saw Maureen. He didn’t bother to do his homework. If he had ever read her trust, he would have known what to do, but did he? No! I should be doing something about this.”

I believe everything happens for a reason. This conversation revealed what my ambition burned for: not some higher-paying, more powerful job, but one that could help women learn from what I learned, one that could set them on the course to financial independence.

What I finally realized was that I was looking for something very similar to what I’d been seeking from my therapy. I once told my psychiatrist, “Help me find a way to make something positive from all the losses I’ve endured in my life, so that they don’t destroy me.” And he did.

More than a decade later, I was staring in the face of that very idea again: trying to make something positive of everything — good and bad — that I’d endured since that time, beginning with my first job all the way to starting my own company. I knew I could use my experiences to teach other women what I’d learned about financial accumulation and markets. And along the way I could also de-mystify this deep, dark secret world of money.

Yes, that would be making something positive out of all my life events.

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