The Boston Consulting Group just conducted a study showing women’s discontent with their money management services. The study’s bottom line was such old news, yet there’s a renewed interest in female wealth because women are growing in numbers and wealth.

As someone who is both a client and consultant working in wealth management most of my work-life, I can say that I totally empathize with women as frustrated consumers of wealth management services. For the most part, wealth managers have not learned how to adequately customize their communication and wealth management services. Their job description is wealth management and that’s their primary responsibility. It becomes complicated when they have to match that wealth management to our complexity of personal dynamics. That’s not their primary competence. So, it takes two to make a satisfactory relationship. We have to educate ourselves as to what we need to have to feel satisfied so we can communicate our needs and expectations. We have to become more assertive wealth management clients and perhaps teach the industry the competencies they need to develop and nurture.

There are a few guidelines which I’ve learned over the years both as a client and consultant in money management communication consulting:

1. Know thyself – be clear about your individual wants, expectations and needs for financial comfort and security;
2. Don’t be judgmental of who you are and what you want – there’s no right or wrong;
3. Don’t expect your money manager to care about your money more than you do – after all, it is your money and not theirs;
4. Be clear and verbalize what it is you expect and check whether your adviser feels that this is reasonable and will deliver; and not least
5. Make sure that you really understand and feel comfortable with both the strategy you’ve chosen and what you can expect in how to keep informed about how you are doing.

In the end, what we want is to feel that we’ll be okay and this comes down to what that means to each and every one of us as individuals. Your wealth manager can only try to empathize with what that may mean second-hand. It’s up to each of us to know what that means financially and how that feels.