Wealth management can for many reasons often present a challenge for lawyers, especially female lawyers, and never more so than in 2021. The chances are you’re starting the year off on a different financial footing than you were this time last year; 2020 altered the financial landscape for many of us, and it’s taken some adjusting to.
Even if you haven’t personally experienced any financial losses or hardship, the last twelve months have thrown up so many challenges that our attention has been spread pretty thin. It would be no surprise at all if you hadn’t given your financial planning and wealth management the attention it needed.
And 2021 is certainly going to hold some more challenges; it would be shortsighted of us to think differently. While you’re dealing with changes to your professional life, to your social life and to your family life, you don’t want to lose your way with your financial life. But with just a little refocusing where it really counts, you can keep your money working hard for you. Here’s what wealth management should look like for female lawyers in 2021.
It’s All Change for Lawyers and Financial Planning
While they may have healthy salaries, female attorneys are not people who are time-rich. As it is, their work hours are long and often unpredictable; and then 2020 really changed the working environment for many female lawyers. A female lawyer’s work always competes with her family life, but 2020 really took that to new levels.
Many lawyers experienced a decrease in demand, and many partners have taken significant pay cuts. Bonuses have been cut, raises postponed. Others have been laid off all together due to firms needing to suddenly downsize to weather the storm. On the other hand, lawyers in some sectors saw a rise in demand thanks to the instability of 2020. For instance, sadly, but maybe unsurprisingly, the demand for family lawyers surged in the middle of the year. Contract lawyers have been more in demand too, as have those attorneys with employment practices.
But whether or not there were significant changes to the amount of work you were getting, female lawyers certainly experienced a significant amount of upheaval in the way in which work was done.
So the theme of 2020 was change, and I saw women all around me rising to meet the challenges they were facing. But if your financial planning didn’t accommodate those changes, then you may well be seeing some disconnect now. And you know the best way of looking after your money while you have other things on your plate? Learn How.