Editor’s Note: Liz Peek is a financial columnist and the author of wowOwow’s Wall Street Weekly. Liz Peek’s SHEconomics series, herewith, is scheduled to become a book. Click here for your introduction.

Welcome to another installment of SHEconomics, our love letter to women who are ready to take charge of their financial welfare. We think that women are as capable of making good investment decisions as unloading the dishwasher. Women are smart, sensible and not nearly as prone to testosterone-driven excess as men. We hope SHEconomics will open doors and help you to breathe the fresh air of independence!

The Lessons of 2008

The champagne has gone flat, the noisemakers have been tossed, old calendars ripped up. There is no question that we have left 2008 behind – and thank heavens. It was a year that none of us will forget unless, God forbid, 2009 turns out to be even worse.

Nearly all of us were losers during the past year. Some lost their jobs, some lost their money and some lost faith in our government and in our economic system. The buffeting we took necessarily leads us to examine … nearly everything, but at the least many of our former assumptions and habits. In short, 2008 will turn out to have been truly cataclysmic only if we learn nothing from it and make the same old mistakes again.

So what lessons lie amid the financial rubble of the past year? For most of us, I think the important lessons have to do with how one should measure risk. I don’t mean the financial industry’s obsession with overly complicated variance analysis that ultimately proved meaningless. I mean a real-people weighing of risk and reward – the kind of thinking that theoretically lies behind every choice we make.

Many years ago the Wall Street Journal published a story about successful people. A researcher had tried to determine what common element or elements linked those who had climbed to the top of the pyramid. His study showed that the trait these high achievers most often shared was that they always measured the downside. That is, before taking a flier of some sort, they took a hard look at what could happen under the absolute worst of assumptions.

There is a saying that pessimists never die rich. I take this to mean that only optimistic people will take the risks necessary to build a fortune. Does this maxim contradict the study’s conclusion? Not at all. It is complementary. I think successful people take advantage of opportunities because they assume a happy result, but at the same time they have considered and accepted the risks presented by the worst of all outcomes.

What does this mean to you and me? Without a doubt we all want to be successful. So, we need to adopt, in addition to other more exciting behaviors (like picking up on trends and finding clever opportunities) this habit of weighing the downside. A habit, for instance, that subprime borrowers neglected.

Taking out a mortgage to buy a house that you cannot afford might seem appealing, especially if property prices in your town are zooming higher. It is so easy to get swept up. You and your neighbors linger over the recycling bins swapping stories about people who just flipped their houses for a 30% gain in one year or about the new condo unit going up down the street charging ludicrously high prices for a one bedroom. The local realtor confesses to having created newly minted millionaires next door, egging you on.