A woman’s dream of buying a home isn’t to have a green kitchen like Dakota Johnson’s or an exact replica of David Harbour’s NYC loft. In contrast, home ownership is “about agency,” in the words of Fannie Mae CEO and President Priscilla Almodovar.
At of luck The most powerful women on Tuesday, Almodovar cashed in on his vast wealth-building legacy known as real estate. Joining the panel titled “Closing the Wealth Gap” was Sallie Krawcheck, founder and CEO of Ellevest.
Women have it he made strides as a homeowner despite having to navigate the rags of a patriarchal society. According to this, there are more single women than single men who are home owners, said Almodovar.
“It’s time for women,” she continued. “The wake of women, when you invest in women, is much stronger than that individual,” explained Almodovar, pointing to the flow of wealth from female breadwinners to their families. In fact, women are often assigned the responsibilities of caring for both the parents and the childrenif they have, because of gender norms. So a leg for them can represent a leg for many.
“Nothing bad happens when women have more money,” Krawcheck asserted, adding that their wealth creation leads to greater spending and economic growth. Women drive and fuel the economy: they account for $20 trillion in annual consumer spending Harvard Business Review.
However, obstacles remain. Only 30% of women say they have the confidence to go through the mortgage process, Almodovar said, calling it a “confidence gap”.
“The lack of understanding of women really shocks us,” she said. “There is a lot of work to be done there. And homeowners, of all genders, face long-term costs such as rising insurance costs (due to climate change), taxes and simple maintenance.”
She claimed that women are more disconnected than men when it comes to the down payment required to buy a house, explaining that this problem is more acute with younger women. “Zillennials — that’s our future homeowner, that’s the cohort, and they’re the ones who don’t understand what it takes to own a home,” he said.
Part of the problem is what women are told they can achieve, Krawcheck said, because “they get negative money messages their whole lives” when it comes to financial planning.
Noting that the gender wage gap keeps many women stuck in unhappy marriages, jobs and lives, Krawcheck added that homeownership is one of the only scalable and predictable markers of wealth building beyond investing. While home ownership is only one piece of the puzzle, Almodovar said, it’s especially important for older women.
“When you look at older women, in terms of their wealth, 66% comes from home equity,” she said. “That sounds high, but it’s not because they have more equity in their house. It’s because they don’t have other assets,” he said, because the average person has 50% of their wealth from their home equity, but they have other assets.
While women are climbing the hill of home ownership, it is still very difficult to break into the market. “I’ve been building houses for a long time. It’s the first time I can remember where the two sides are talking about housing,” Almodovar said about the presidential election, which he said shows the “affordability crisis” in general.
Hitting poor and low-income families harder, the housing dilemma continues across all ages and income levels, Almodovar said. Citing the fact that the average age of the home owner is later, prices are constantly rising and Generation Z are living at home longer, Almodovar stated that “housing will not disappear” as a problem.
On the other hand, “it’s an exciting time,” he said, “because people are, you know, finally saying, ‘What about housing?'”
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