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Celebrating Women’s Day with information: Resources to empower you

It’s International Women’s Day. Instead of giving you just another pretty graphic to celebrate, I want to give you information that will actually empower YOU. This post is crammed with resources to not just help you, but also your teenage daughter. Or your 25-year-old one. Happy reading!

Resources for financial empowerment for women

Women, as it turns out, often are clueless about the state of financials in the family. This can spell disaster in so many situations. In a divorce. In even a family emergency, where the partner is incapacitated or has passed away, and the woman is left with no clue as to what to do. So here are some common sense pointers:

➤➤Always have a list of bank account numbers and login info. Get in and monitor these accounts regularly

➤➤Have an account in your own name, in addition to a joint account – better to make it a high-yield savings account – see the next section.

➤➤Join a women’s finance group for advice and pointers – Women’s Personal Finance and Females and Finances are 2 Facebook groups I’m a part of.

General financial advice for diversifying your money

➤➤Put some money in stocks or mutual funds. ETrade is a great platform that I’ve used to buy stocks and mutual funds with no overheads. If you are unsure of what to buy, just buy and hold broad-market ETFs such as SCHB or VTI. Year over year, they are likely to give you a return of about 7% annually in the long term.

➤➤Open a referred high-yield savings account (HYSA) – this gets you a higher rate:

A referred Marcus Goldman Sachs account gets you a 4.75% APY currently. You get that rate (1% bump) for 3 months when you join through a referred link, and you can invite your friends to extend it out. A max of 5 referrals can happen per year, with each referral getting you 3 months at that rate.

A referred Wealthfront account gets you 4.55% APY currently. You get that rate (0.50% bump) for 3 months when you join through a referred link, and you can invite your friends to extend it out. There’s no limit to the number of referrals, but the maximum extended APY increase will be applied up to 12 months.

Note that the base rate of Wealthfront (4.05%) is higher than that of Marcus Goldman Sachs (3.75%). Wealthfront also has a higher FDIC insured limit for protection (up to 2 million vs $250,000).

➤➤In the current market, buying Series I Treasury Bonds makes a lot of sense. The current interest rate (6.89%) is very high (the new rate will be applied after April 2023). Note: These earn interest for 30 years, and there is no penalty if cashed after 5 years.

Resources for health empowerment

Women are often given advice by their medical professionals that may not optimize their health in the long term. I listened to a transformative podcast of a conversation between a Harvard-trained gynecologist turned integrative medicine practicing doctor and Dr. Andew Huberman, and I was electrified. Such amazing advice in here – you CAN stay healthy and vital heading towards menopause and well beyond. If you don’t have the time to listen, here are the cliff notes:

The best birth control form is the copper IUD. Oral contraceptives are generally not good news, and can be really detrimental in a subset of women, but are better than no contraception at all if needed.

Knowing and managing your stress by knowing your cortisol levels is extremely helpful.

Getting a baseline of hormones at various stages of a woman’s life is hugely useful in any number of ways – for example, finding out you have PCOS in your teens helps you plan better for having a baby, instead of finding out in your mid-30s than you are infertile because you waited too long with a condition you did not know you had.

Getting the Coronary calcium test done before the age of 45 is a very useful prognostic tool for cardiac health, for men AND women. As women, we tend to ignore cardiac health risks, and this is something to change.

I would strongly urge you to listen to her podcast, and also read her book, The Hormone Cure – you can get it for free through an Audible trial, if you are a first-time member.

Overall, I am extremely interested in integrative health. If you know and can recommend other great integrative health physicians to follow, please mention them in the comments!

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