Stop with all the mansplaining. Please.

The journey to this place in time, releasing the first of a series of blogs that I need to write and believe women would feel good reading, is a long one. It started with a stupid question asked after the housing collapse. How is there seemingly a ton of financial advice out there but clearly people couldn’t get it? So I began to walk the convoluted path that the average person seeking advice is forced to walk daily.

I got to see the super nice guys at church who seemed to care a lot about my money. They explained mortality risk and investment return and guaranteed cash values and variable annuities. Charts showed complicated formulas that spit out impressive rates of return. It was bewildering. A few questions from me prompted awkward answers with even more jargon heaped on. But cutting through the mansplain, I was able to pin down an answer. If I didn’t buy something, he made nothing. Nada. If I did buy something, and coincidentally, mansplainer thought it was a great idea that I buy something and probably buy a lot of it, then he made money. If I and other people bought a lot, then he paid his car payment. That was his plan for getting his kids into college. He needed me.

Luckily, I dug down deep enough to find out that he needed me a lot more than I needed him.

Then there were the folks who took my money and invested it. An advisor sat me down and mansplained inflation adjusted rates of return, mid cap value stocks and Monte Carlo simulations.  I found myself nodding in amazement that someone could be so smart. But a quick read of a few basic books on investments highlighted a disconnect. It seemed that the more work the advisors did on my savings, the more complex it became, the worse it performed, and the more money it costs me.

Wow, what a generalization of an industry. I, of course, can name twenty advisors and insurance sales people who are exceptions, but when I speak at conferences and describe these interactions there is overwhelming enthusiastic nodding in the audience. That is a problem.

So, what’s happening now that you need to know? The investment industry is in a quandary. The Department of Labor spilled the beans a few years back when it proposed the fiduciary rule, saying that advisors would have to act in the best interest of their clients. It was very controversial and opposed vigorously by the insurance industry, successfully as it turned out, but the damage was done. People began to ask questions. You mean, these guys aren’t fiduciaries? Why was it so controversial that people holding themselves out as advisors had to act in their client’s best interest? Wasn’t that obvious? Apparently not. There must be a lot of money at stake. So, clients began to ask about fees. They read a little about those products they had bought and realized that they were of greater benefit to the person who sold them than to the person who bought them.

The insurance industry will never change its game plan by regulation. It has far too much money tied up in its lobbying efforts to allow that. It is going to change its game plan only when forced to by educated consumers - you.

The other side of the financial industry is the investment side, those people who take your money, invest it, and by mystical powers seem to charge their clients nothing. Maybe it is all charity. Maybe it’s a special favor to me, or the non-profit foundation they are managing. But one or two direct questions—how much money did you make off my account in fees and commissions in the last 12 month period—can demolish this house of cards and reveal some devastating news to you. My money—the money I peeled away painfully from my paycheck each month--money I could have spent on a weekend at the lake, the hospital bill from my recent foot procedure, or going ahead and signing up my kids for an extra week at the camp they love--- that money that I thought was going to my retirement for my sole benefit, was actually benefiting someone else. And I didn’t even know.

And it’s all the mansplaining. That’s it. It’s the jargon that people use that makes things sound so complicated that we can’t possibly understand. It makes us relax in the fact that they are managing our money. We are lulled into pretending that we don’t really need to know how people get paid. It’s just too complicated.

Ladysplaining will go head-to-head with the industry jargon and false impressions. I have an insider and researched view of this world. I am a part of this industry; but I have rejected many of its practices. My own business was designed as an answer to the industry failures. We charge fixed, hourly fees. We invoice clients and ask them to write checks. Our fees are not a sale, they reflect our hours of work. We sell no products. Nothing. So, I have the freedom to share what I know to be the truth in a way most people in the industry never could.

I can promise that I will not use jargon. Rather, I will use plain language to explain what I know in the financial world. Once a concept is clear, we will look at the jargon used in place of clear language and get a good laugh out of it.

As you read this, please check any shame or fear at the door. This is the friendliest invitation to the financial table that you will ever get. A famous blogger created a blog for physicians promising to give them a fair shake on Wall Street. He has probably single handedly put hundreds of millions of dollars in fees back into physicians’ pockets simply by giving them education and information. I want to do that for you. Research is clear that women are more alienated from the financial industry than men, and I want you to get a fair shake. But it will take knowledge, education, and, yes, a good laugh.

The industry has some ‘splainin to do.