Benjamin Felix
speaker
5,821 appearances
21 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 17 Sep
Benjamin Felix’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 21 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
one spouse and that can be with an advisor, but good financial advisors will try and check that and engage both spouses.
podcast-host
But I think if it's just the two people on their own, a lot of decisions can end up being dominated by one spouse.
podcast-host
And it's not because the concepts are too complicated for the other spouse to understand.
podcast-host
But it can be difficult to step back and be objective about your own financial life without defaulting into how things are usually done.
podcast-host
If your spouse in either direction just always makes these decisions or does stuff and tells you about it after the fact, then it's kind of hard to step back and say, well, hey, maybe we should approach this decision differently.
podcast-host
And I do think that being mediator is not quite the right word, but being somewhat of a financial mediator or neutral third party between couples does end up being a big part of what advisors at firms like PWL Capital do for couple clients.
podcast-host
It's just a different conversation when there's a third party who's not part of the relationship in the room.
podcast-host
Research on this does tend to point toward male dominated influence on important household decisions like asset allocation.
podcast-host
A 2026 paper in the review of financial studies shows that the average Australian household incorporates 60% of the husband's risk tolerance, but only 40% of the wife's into the household level asset allocation.
podcast-host
The author state that this implies a 20 percentage point gap in bargaining power.
podcast-host
A half of that gender gap is driven by observable characteristics like income and employment.
podcast-host
And then the other half can be traced back to a gender effect as the authors describe it.
podcast-host
The average bargaining power for husbands is 69% in Germany and 61% in the United States.
podcast-host
But the authors do say that the three countries, Australia, Germany, and the US are statistically indistinguishable from each other in terms of husband bargaining power.
podcast-host
But all of them are above 60%.
podcast-host
What's most surprising here is that discounting a wife's financial input cannot be attributed solely to her lack of financial knowledge.
podcast-host
The 2021 Journal of Finance paper, Who Wears the Pants, finds that US households with a financially sophisticated husband are more likely to participate in the stock market than households with a wife of equal financial sophistication.
podcast-host
And the authors argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms rather than by differences in competence.
podcast-host
So they also run a randomized experiment in the paper, which points to the mechanism.
podcast-host
Female identity suppresses the wife's willingness to contribute ideas, while male identity makes husbands less receptive to a spouse's input.
podcast-host
Showing 501–520 of 5,821 · page 26 of 292
← Previous
Next →