Alternative Investment: Marrying a Millionaire

Days ago, my attention was caught by the headline above on CNN's website. I'm capturing the news article plus the video, to share with all of you. It's a rather, erm.. controversial topic. Haha. But you're welcome (and encouraged) to drop your two cents here on comments. : )

Alternative Investment: Marrying a Millionaire

HONG KONG, China – My colleague Ali Velshi likes to say that there are three ways to secure your financial future – by winning the lottery, marrying a millionaire, or managing your finances. Managing your finances would appear to be most practical – unless, of course, you are a student of Ms. Lisa Johnson Mandell.

Lisa is an American dating guru. She recently held a class in Hong Kong giving tips based on her book “How To Snare A Millionaire.” Snagging a sugar daddy is one of the best investment decisions you can make, she assured me. She should know, she said, because she is married to one. She has had 50 marriage proposals – at least a dozen of the men came with seven-figure salaries, she told the room of aspiring spouses.
So how do you snare a millionaire?
This is the advice she gave to the 98 women and two men in attendance. (Well, more like one man – the other fled the meeting during the first break. The poor guy didn’t know what he had signed up for.)

Do’s
1. Be the prize. Lisa suggests women wear bright-colored dresses and walk around in "power” (read: stiletto) heels. Men were programmed to hunt, she says.

2. Be approachable. While walking, make eye contact and smile. When interested in someone sitting across a room, think (but don’t say aloud), “Oh, baby, oh, baby, you are the hottest thing I have ever seen, and we need each other bad.” If you can do that (without snorting your drink with laughter), supposedly like a tractor beam, your target will wander over and ask, “Excuse me, did we just have a moment?”

3. Be at the right place, at the right time. To Lisa, that means hang out where the rich boys are — cigar bars, full-service apartments, bar areas at expensive steak restaurants, posh hotel lobbies.

Don’t’s
1. Don’t talk too much. On the first date, no mention of children, former lovers, emotional hang-ups, the state of your finances or his. Don’t prattle on about the finer details of your overqualified resume – he might be inclined to hire you, rather than date you.

2. Don’t be nervous. Exude confidence. If you don’t know what to talk about — don’t. Ask him more questions about himself, Lisa says. He’ll think you understand him even more.
Don’t jump in the sack. She says most women would want to sleep with a millionaire right away. So you need to play hard to get.

Lisa cannot quantify how successful her advice is and admits that it could sound mercenary. However, she blames the stigma on society’s double standards.

Men and women were wired, she believes, to behave this way. “From the cave man days way back when, we had to mate with the men who were the most successful.” Those would be the best hunters, she explained to me. “These days that kind of success often equates to wealth.” She says men, in turn, are engineered to pursue beautiful women because beauty indicates good health.

“Nobody looks askance at men because they want a beautiful wife,” she points out. “But if you say, ‘Go out and find a rich husband’, it sounds awful.”

What she preaches, she says, is different from gold-digging. Gold-diggers are women who “want to separate the man from his money,” Lisa explains.

“Someone who wants to marry a successful man is just normal.”
True, perhaps, though not all women define success in terms of dollars.

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