by Kristen Euretig, CFP® Founder & Chief Planner
In the September newsletter, we talked about the latest financial trend on TikTok, #girlmath. If you missed it, you can read up here. If girl math is justifying expensive purchases, what is boy math? Since then, #boymath has been trending with many hilarious takes on what #boymath is exactly.
I have my own take as a professional in the space with the awareness that this is all totally gendered and overgeneralized, but my experience with #boymath is perfectly encapsulated in the Barbie movie.
Barbie: “I just have all my money in a savings account.”
Ken: “That’s totally wrong. You need treasury bonds, corporate bonds, CDs… CD stands for certificate of deposit.”
I’m going to call a spade a spade and say that #boymath is giving bad financial advice with total confidence that it is indeed great advice. And I have a metric to prove it. In a recent Bank of America study Women, Money, Confidence: A Lifelong Relationship, just 27% of women believe that men are more knowledgeable about finances and investing than women. Compare that to 43% of men who believe they are more knowledgeable than women!
Ken’s advice is a perfect example of #boymath. Treasury bonds and CDs are actually just alternative forms of holding cash and someone who has a large savings balance may actually want to diversify away from cash with a combination of stocks and perhaps, yes Ken, corporate bonds too.
Ken was also probably a crypto-evangelist, GameStop investor and Robinhood user. Barbie is the one that invested early in real estate as the proud owner of her dream home. So for all you women out there who fear that their brother/uncle/dad/boyfriend knows better than you do – you got this girl. Go with your gut and get the help you need to take control of your finances from trusted sources.