Mapping Money Matters--for Women Only : Brokers Flora Burke and Sue Mamer offer their expertise to a special group of clients, many of them newly widowed or divorced and making their own financial decisions for the first time.

Sue Mamer’s building has a glass elevator ascending the 10 stories to her penthouse office. One of her recent customers was afraid to ride it, so Mamer rode down to the lobby to meet her for coffee.

This is just a guess, but it doesn’t seem likely that many stockbrokers have such problems.

Mamer is involved in a year-old partnership with Flora Burke, a fellow financial consultant with Shearson Lehman Bros. in Newport Beach, to market money management advice to women. Their customers are generally over 50, newly divorced or widowed, and making financial decisions for the first time in their lives.

The Burke-Mamer partnership is one of five pilot programs that Shearson Lehman Bros. launched last fall. They hold monthly seminars called “Women and Wealth” and--a recent addition--”Couples and Wealth.”

The Shearson investment company, which is part of American Express, had identified mature women as one of its growth markets. Women often end up in control of some or all of a couple’s assets, through divorce or because women live longer than their husbands.

Southern California, and especially Newport Beach, is populated with the sort of well-to-do women that Shearson hopes to reach, according to Shelley Freeman, the company’s national financial planning director. Mamer said some of the women at a recent seminar had assets of up to $2 million.

Freeman said the pilot programs have proven that there is a market among women, and Shearson is now honing in on select groups: women business owners and recently divorced women. She declined to estimate how big the market could be in dollars.

It was Freeman’s research that persuaded Shearson to consider target marketing to older women, Mamer said. Freeman created a computer program that mapped out life expectancy for women and showed how their savings could dwindle to nothing, eroded by inflation and taxes, even while they had years left to live.

Pointing that out to a roomful of women can be persuasive. Mamer has a two-sided sheet, for example, that shows what can happen to $100,000 held by a woman (or a man) at age 50. One side shows the money invested in taxable holdings (a savings account, bonds, stocks); the other shows the results of making tax-deferred investments (an annuity, a 401(k) plan, an IRA).

By age 84, the first investor, who spends $25,000 a year, has run out of money and has nothing to leave heirs. The other investor spends the same $25,000 a year until death at age 85, and leaves more than $500,000 behind. Women who are now 58 have a life expectancy of 86, Mamer said.

Barbara Nevitt, 41, attended a Burke-Mamer seminar last week and said that she is determined to put her mother’s finances in better order. “My father passed away and left my mother money, but it’s obvious to me now that it’s not going to be enough unless she invests,” Nevitt said.

Burke and Mamer’s seminars have attracted as many as 60 women. Last week, they drew a dozen.

The two plan to write a book about what women should know about investments. What they have learned about marketing to women surely warrants some attention.

For one, the direct approach works. “We tell (seminar audiences) up front that we are not teachers, but we take an educational approach,” Mamer said.

Lastly, the pair learned that they have to be especially discreet because many women do not want their husbands to know that they are seeking financial advice independently. “When we call, we leave a message saying, ‘This is Sue and Flora from “Women and Wealth,” we met you at the library,’ ” Mamer said.

They said they get about two or three clients from each seminar, for a total of about 50 in the last year. That’s not as many as they had hoped, but they believe they’re laying groundwork for the future. Some of the seminar attendees, especially just after a divorce or death of a husband, are not ready to make decisions about money.