Close the Gender Investment Gap with Ellevest.com

Not investing properly costs women millions a year. Here's how to get a fast (and free) financial plan that helps you plan for your future goals

By The LifeMinute Team

September 20, 2016

You've heard of the gender pay gap. But have you heard of the gender investment gap? Ellevest.com CEO Sallie Krawcheck certainly has in her many years on Wall Street. "Women don't invest in this country and it can cost them tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars over the course of their lives," she says.

Krawcheck spent the better part of her career on Wall Street running Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and Smith Barney. Through this experience she recognized this outstanding need and set out to build a site to address it. Hence, Ellevest.com.

What Do Women Want?

Ellevest.com is a digital investment platform for women. "We spent hundreds of hours really co-creating this with women with a view of 'why don't they invest and what can we provide for them to get them to invest?'" says Krawcheck. Short answer? It's not boring sports analogies, it's not having an industry symbol that's a bull, but instead rather than these male things it's simply getting rid of lots of jargon.

"What we built is a site that is beautiful. The design was led by the individual who worked on the redesign of Vogue.com so a site that women feel pretty familiar with. Then we built something that's very different from what's out there. Rather than, hey want a large cap value mutual fund versus a small cap growth ETF? These are the questions that are asked now," explains the CEO.

Updated and Easy-To-Navigate

The site takes a more personal approach, asking women what they want to achieve in life. "Tell us about you. They go through and they pick goals in life. Such as starting a business, buying a home, retiring well, having a family, making a big splurge. We use very powerful technology that we built--proprietary technology--to put together a full financial plan," Krawchek says. Women can make trade offs: Retire a little bit later to have the house a little bit sooner, for example.

Next, Ellevest.com provides a highly customized investment portfolio for women. "The goal is to get them to their goals or better in the significant majority of markets. If they fall off track we let them know they fell off track and tell them how to get back on."

The site's algorithm always keeps in mind that women live longer than men and that women's salaries tend to peak sooner than men's.

Take Financial Control

Visit Ellevest.com to receive a free financial plan. "These are plans like back in the day when I was on Wall Street. Then they cost a few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars. With Ellevest.com they are free so you can begin to see what you are able to achieve and make some trade offs."

Says Krawcheck: "Last week we announced a new funding round for Ellevest.com. We're so excited about it because we've got some really amazing women like Venus Williams, Mellody Hobson who runs Ariel investments in Chicago, a group of venture capitalists from the West Coast Sonja Perkins, Thereza Gao, Jennifer Fonstad, Miriam Rivera as well as some more traditional venture capitalists who are investing in Ellevest. So we have crazy accomplished women investing their money in this digital investment platform. It's women helping other women invest their money to make up the gender investment gap,"

Working Together

The guys out there may be wondering 'why I should care'? "The truth is that you should care because it's good for women, it's good for families, it's good for markets to have more capital in markets and therefore it's also good for society and the economy. So we are really excited about it and really excited to be here talking about it," says Krawcheck.

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