It's just money, honey

Net worth does not equal self-worth." How many times have we uttered that phrase to ourselves and wished society would drum it into our daughters?

But maybe there's a good reason that society doesn't convey it. Maybe the reason is: our net worth does reflect our self-worth.

Consider the story of Oseola McCarty, a Mississippi washerwoman who died in 1999 with a net worth of $250,000. She earned it over 75 years of doing other people's laundry. McCarty could have burned the cash on a gasguzzling car that would have taken her well beyond the grocery store and church, to which she walked every week. Instead, she saved.

At 87, McCarty bequeathed $150,000 to a scholarship fund for African Americans of limited means at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her donation encouraged more contributions so that, with her principal compounding as others added to it, the Oseola McCarty Endowed Scholarship Fund accumulated $330,000 when she died four years later.

McCarty enjoyed the means to do good precisely because she afforded herself the dignity of discipline. As she observed in the 1996 book, Simple Wisdom for Rich Living, "It's not the ones that make the big money, but the ones who know how to save, who get ahead."

With this statement, she showed that what often distinguishes those with a high net worth from those with a power paycheque is whether they value themselves. Do they have the faith in themselves to believe they're responsible for their choices? Are they self-assured enough to avoid the reckless spending involved in keeping up with the Joneses? Do they know the difference between their needs and their wants? In short, can they appreciate that the immediacy of their self-worth shapes the eventuality of their net worth?

Those questions become more relevant as several realities converge. First, because women are outliving men, women have to generate more retirement income. Second, mutual funds are making investment accessible to everyone (indeed, they emerged in the 1960s to bust the elite's grip on the stock market). Third, the Internet is driving a do-it-yourself ethic by posting previously private information and delivering real-time data. Finally, all of these factors are giving rise to discount brokerages that further undermine the "you-gotta-have-money-to-make-money" assumption.

Translation: Investing is now up to us, gals. Beauty is, we can achieve the kind of personal consciousness-raising through capital-raising that evenings of feminist theory once offered (and, to be sure, still do for some).

For instance, if you diversify your portfolio too much, that could mean you don't know what you want for yourself, thus shedding light on why you're never happy in your relationships.

On the other hand, you might delude yourself that you're balanced by virtue of maximizing your RRSPs through mutual funds, then dabbling in the stock market with whatever remains. But if you dive into a speculative stock, get whooped, get out, yet suddenly find yourself getting back in for the next 'opportunity,' you could be addicted to saga. This, in turn, might help explain why you're always looking for something to argue about with loved ones. (A purely hypothetical example, I assure my partner.)

Now suppose you hang on to that plunging stock, rationalizing that it's in the central sector of our decade--wireless communications--and will therefore bounce back. Months later, suppose it's even stinkier, yet you continue to hold because you've come this far with it and why cut your losses if there's a remote possibility of the share price skyrocketing?

Are you an unabashed optimist who makes the best of a complicated world? Or does your romanticism signal a deep personal tendency to be charmed, manipulated by fear and finally exploited until you have nothing left to give? (The hypothesis continues...she writes nervously.)

Above all, if you put most of your money into bonds, will you learn anything from the guaranteed gains? Without volatility, how will you toughen your coating to withstand the uncertainties of life in this non-linear age? And will you regret having taken the ultimate risk-namely, confusing safety with security?

Money is emotional. What a lucrative substitute for therapy. I say "lucrative" because for anyone with the luxury of a long-term horizon-young women, listen up-investing will almost certainly pay off well.

The magical math of compound interest is so inescapable that even those who lost 80 per cent of their holdings in the stock market crash of 1929 walked away winners by 1955 as long as they didn't sell.

The next several months could put my hope to a very harsh test. The Bush power revival in the U.S. might inflame Middle East tensions and, with them, oil prices. A recession may hit. Company profit warnings could slash stock valuations to a fraction of the fraction that they already are.

But that would make investing an even better bargain. At this point, you really won't need to be rich to get rich. Like Oseola McCarty, you'll just need to accept that you're worth it.

Irshad Manji is host and senior producer of Citytv's Queer Television.