This 92-year-old just became one of US' richest self-made women. Joan Payden is worth $700 million

Joan Payden had launched her money management firm in 1983. (Image credit: payden.com)

Joan Payden was 52 when she quit her job and emptied her company-sponsored retirement account and convinced her colleague Sandra Rygel to start a money management firm together. That was in 1983, four decades since, Payden continues to manage money and has even become one of the richest (and oldest) self-made women in the US.

The 92-year-old is the CEO of the Los Angeles-based firm Payden & Rygel which  manages more than $161 billion in assets and nearly 240 employees across multiple offices, according to its website.

As a majority owner, Payden’s assets have grown with the firm and currently, she boasts an estimated net worth of roughly $700 million. She is also a “newcomer” on the 2024 list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women recently published by Forbes.

Payden’s path to success, however, spanned decades. According to a report by the publication, she studied math and physics at Trinity College in Washington and became one of just a handful of women engineers at a New Jersey-based company building oil refineries in the 1950s but was laid off after three years.

Deciding to make her background in math to good use in the financial sector, Payden then joined investment management company Merrill Lynch. “I was hired at a 25 percent discount because I didn’t know the difference between a bond and stock,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1999.

In a couple years, Payden joined another prestigious money management firm in Los Angeles where she became the firm’s first-ever female partner.

But by 1983, she was wary of becoming stuck “in the same place” for another decade and decided to launch her own firm. Since then, she’s built Payden & Rygel into one of the largest private money management firms in the country. “There are always worries. When I set up the company, I worried I wouldn’t get clients,” she told The Los Angeles Times. “But that was no problem.”