The new craze in the wealth-management world is wealthy women.
Every major private bank and trust company seems to have a special women's initiative or women's outreach program. A recent report warned of a severe shortage of female financial advisors given the vast amount of female wealth that's expected to pour into the purses of Americans in the coming years.
How much exactly? Well, that's the trouble. Determining the current and future number of wealthy women in the U.S.—and their wealth—has become a wild guessing game.
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The most commonly cited numbers come from the Internal Revenue Service, which said that in 2005 about half of the Americans with assets of more than $675,000 were women and they had a total fortune of $5.8 trillion.
But a 2009 study in the Harvard Business Review said women controlled 51.3 percent of wealth in America, which amounts to about $14 trillion in personal wealth. It projected their assets to grow to $22 trillion by 2019.