Women's Guide to Financial Self-Defense

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAR 31, 1997

While you and your husband are still together is a good time to extract from him the financial information you'll need when he's dead or gone. So writes financial adviser Mays in this simplistic but practical money guide for women. Mays opens with sob stories of women victimized by men and by their own ignorance. (One separated husband "stole" family valuables, sold them, then filed an insurance claim for the loss.) She presses her readers to organize in a loose-leaf notebook essential financial facts including net worth, insurance policies and real estate. The book lays out the steps so clearly that it reads like a collection of recipes. For your safe-deposit box, Mays instructs: label a page of your notebook "safe deposit box"; write down the number and bank branch location; list the contents of the box; write down where you put the key. Women are encouraged to contact their husbands' employers if necessary to obtain information on retirement plans, employee stock options and so on. A full-fledged survey of investment possibilities, also given here, is concise but a bit advanced for a readership of women presumed accustomed to leaving such matters to their husbands. Cartoons leaven the advice. Author tour.