Four Expert Tips on Personal Finance for Executive Women

The Glass Hammer, one of my favorite blogs for women in business, posted a great article last week with tips on personal finance for executive women. It was contributed by Myra Salzer, author of Inheritor’s Sherpa and Living Richly: Seizing the Potential of Inherited Wealth. You can find a snippet below. (Keep the awesome content coming!)

1. First – secure your “nut.” There is a quick and easy way to calculate whether or not you have inherited enough to have your “nut” secure already. Can you comfortably live on one fortieth of your inheritance? For example, let’s say you inherited $10 million. $10 million divided by 40 equals $250,000. If all your needs and wants would be met on $250,000 per year (after taxes and adjusting for inflation) then your “nut” is secure. All you need to do is invest in a manner that keeps up with inflation and spending. Of course, you’ll miss out on the next hot IPO (initial public offering) and you will never again enjoy cocktail-party bragging rights boasting about your latest venture. But you will be secure.

2. Then – find an investment management firm whose intractable systematic approach is wealth preservation. (We recommend independent registered investment advisory firms that don’t sell any products and who are not associated with any brokerage houses or broker dealers.) Remember, you don’t need to make a killing in the markets when your “nut” is secure. You need only avoid losses. This isn’t nearly as easy to accomplish as it was for Grandmother, but it is doable. Find someone with a global perspective whose analysis goes beyond the scope of modern portfolio theory and CFA (certified financial analyst) curriculum.

3. Make sure your investment manager is a fiduciary, a person or firm whose legal obligation is first to you, above all else. If the management firm is, for example, a public company, the managers’ first obligation is to the firm’s shareholders, so they cannot possibly be fiduciaries. Demand that the manager agrees to a fiduciary contract.

More here

The World's Highest-Paid Female Athletes

The U.S. opening begins at the end of the month, and dozens of female tennis professionals have their endorsements lined up for the season. Forbes.com recently put together a list of the world’s highest paid female athletes, and as you might expect tennis starts top the list. I have included a section of the article below, but you can find the full text here.

Serena Williams may be the No. 1-ranked player, but she can not match the earnings power of Maria Sharapova. Thanks to a bevy of endorsements with blue chip companies like Nike, Sony Ericsson and Tiffany, Sharapova pulled in $24.5 million over the past year, making her the highest-paid female athlete in the world. She earned $1 million from prize money, with the rest derived from endorsements and appearance fees.

Sharapova's breakthrough came in 2004, when she won her first Grand Slam title at Wimbledon. Her agents at IMG quickly capitalized on her success and good looks by inking deals with Canon Colgate-Palmolive and Motorola.

Sharapova has struggled in recent years on the court with injuries, but has bounced back in 2010 with two tourney wins. She also signed a massive eight-year deal with Nike at the beginning of the year that could be worth as much as $70 million. The deal provides royalties from her tennis line, as well as a line of bags and shoes through Nike subsidiary Cole Haan.

Our income figures cover June 2009 through June 2010 and include prize money, endorsements, appearance fees and exhibitions. Tennis players dominate the top 10, making up half the list, while golfers nab three spots. Our list of the highest-paid athletes in the world (male or female) included 30% born outside the U.S. This list of highest-paid women is even more international, with women from six different countries making the cut.

Continue reading at Forbes.com…

More Women Taking On Second Job

Families across the country are struggling to keep up with mounting bills, while still managing to keep food on the table. As this article from ABC News explains, 27 million Americans are working second jobs to make ends meet, and a record number of women are taking on extra work as well.

For Marie Benoit-Wilcox, a second, freelance job is matter-of-fact, and gets started even before her "day job" begins. Benoit-Wilcox, a perinatal system coordinator at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan and mother of two teenagers, has been supplementing her income for over a decade selling Avon cosmetics. Each morning when she wakes shortly after 4 a.m., she spends an hour at her Irvington, N.J., home working on client lists and going over orders before commuting to the hospital.

"Saturdays are my all-day-Avon day," she says. "And Sunday I hope I've got time with my family, maybe see a concert or have a party with the kids."

It may seem like a time crunch, but the success she's seen over the past decade make it all worth it. The moonlighting money has enabled her to give her children private educations, a college fund and a family cruise to the Caribbean.

Benoit-Wilcox began her second career as a sales rep after her mother, also involved with Avon, became ill in 1999. "I wanted to be able to keep buying the products, so the only solution was selling myself!" she jokes. She has been with the company for 11 years, including three consecutive years of soaring success--moving a benchmark 112,000 units of Avon product--and sees only great things in the future, for both her business and her family.

Continue reading at ABC News.Go.com…

Analysis: Winners and losers in Tuesday's races

Girl Power! The primary elections on Tuesday were dominated by women winners. CNN today gives Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln a special shout out for successfully overcoming an aggressive, multimillion-dollar campaign by national unions and liberal interest groups. Among her, were other female winners I will list below with a little information about them from CNN.com:

Nikki Haley: After enduring more than two weeks of accusations of infidelity, South Carolina state Rep. Nikki Haley nearly walked away with the 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Not one, but two men have claimed to have had extramarital affairs with Haley, who deftly maintained her composure and denied the allegations. The voters responded.

Sharron Angle: The Tea Party movement and the anti-tax Club for Growth scored a win Tuesday after Sharron Angle emerged as the nominee in the crowded field of Republicans running in Nevada's Senate primary. Angle topped former state Republican Party chair Sue Lowden and businessman Danny Tarkanian for the right to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in November.

California's CEOs: Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina turned impressive resumes in the business world into Republican tickets for the November show. Whitman, the former eBay CEO, spent more than $71 million of her own money to ensure that she defeated rival Steve Poizner in the race for California's Republican gubernatorial nomination.

Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO, beat out conservative Assemblyman Chuck DeVore and centrist former Rep. Tom Campbell for the right to challenge Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in November. And Boxer and Fiorina are wasting no time attacking one another in what will very likely be a brutal and expensive general election campaign.

The 50 Women to Watch 2008

From the Wall Street Journal:

In her concession speech in June, Hillary Clinton lamented that she wasn't able to "shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling," but she said it now has "about 18 million cracks in it."

Indeed, women played a defining role in this year's historic election, whether as candidates, spouses or comedians.

But in the corporate world, the notion of "18 million cracks" remains something of a pipe dream. While women have made great strides professionally in the past two decades, their numbers in the upper echelons of corporate America have stagnated in the past few years.

On Wall Street -- possibly the toughest ceiling to crack -- two of the most high-profile women made an exit in the past year: Citigroup's Sallie Krawcheck and Morgan Stanley's Zoe Cruz.

But out of the ashes of the economic meltdown, some new stars have emerged -- most notably Sheila Bair, No. 1 on this year's Women to Watch list, who has been thrust into the spotlight in her bank-rescue role as a hard-charging regulator at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Barbara Desoer, No. 3 on this year's list, has risen to a pivotal role at Bank of America as president of mortgage, home equity and insurance services.

Obama’s War on Women?

From the New York Sun Editorial:

“The Obama campaign has at long last lifted the veil of mystery that has surrounded the Democratic presidential candidate's tax increase plans. Mr. Obama's two economic advisers, Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee, have an op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal, and it isn't pretty. To begin with, they propose bringing back the 39.6% top income tax bracket, an increase from the 35% current top rate. On top of that, he'd impose a new payroll tax on those top earners of 2% to 4%, bringing their marginal tax rate to as high as 43.6%. Add to that the top New York City income tax rate of 3.648% and the top New York State income tax rate of 6.85%, and the nominal marginal income tax rate mounts to a staggering 54%. Because Mr. Obama proposes to put the capital gains and dividend tax rate at 20% even for the ‘rich’ — a mere 33% increase over the current 15% rate — expect to see plenty of high earners scurrying to find creative ways of structuring their income as capital gains or dividends rather than as earned income.

Meanwhile, the most astonishing sentence in the op-ed is this one: ‘His plan would not raise any taxes on couples making less than $250,000 a year, nor on any single person with income under $200,000.’ It amounts to a declaration of war on two-income families, a marriage penalty of punitive proportions. If those two single persons, with income just under $200,000 get married, Mr. Obama is going to hammer them with a huge tax increase. If the second earner, who in many cases is the woman, is going to have to give 54% of what she earns to the government, she might as well stay home with the children. Mr. Obama may be able to get away with symbolic slights to women, such as not picking Senator Clinton as vice president. But punishing them with confiscatory taxes for participating in the workforce at a high income level moves the slight into the realm of substance.”