To be fair, some Gen-X women can be decent clients, especially for newer or younger advisors or those willing to work on a commission basis. Older Gen Xers, especially those 30 and up, have started saving, and 30% of those who earn $50,000 or more per year have socked away $25,000 or more in their retirement plans.

In fact, some Gen Xers report they already are working with a broker or financial advisor. A total of 33% of male Gen Xers and 32% of women say they've worked with a financial professional. The most active Gen-X investors say they don't use the Internet to invest.

While female advisors might assume they have a lock on this group, women Gen Xers report that isn't so, at least not yet. Sixty nine percent of those working with a financial professional say they're working with a male broker or advisor, compared with 72% of men who are using a male professional.

"This is tomorrow's affluent and middle class," Macaskill says. "They increasingly are recognizing the need for financial assistance, and they're a lot more savvy than their predecessors. They're not going to wake up at age 40 and say: 'Where's a planner so I can bring my $200,000 in?'"

Macaskill also doesn't credit online brokers as being the savior of many of these women, since a significant number just don't have the impetus or know-how to do their own planning and investing. That could change with maturity. But for now, a whopping 63% of Gen-X women say they don't know how a mutual fund works. Only 38% know that stocks have outperformed bonds, and 19% say they understand the relationship between bonds and interest rates.

That said, serious financial habits and an interest in investing might just be part of maturing. It doesn't appear to be very different for Generation-X men. Yes, they have a bit less debt, but only 15% of them have accumulated $25,000 for retirement so far, outpacing Generation-X women on this score by just two percentage points.

If aging makes women more serious about investing, Summers is again a case in point. Summers got her wake-up call in 1999 when she signed on as head of sales and marketing for the Women's Equity Mutual Fund in New York. "I would go to investing seminars for women and talk about the fact that 50% of women wind up living on $1,000 a month after age 65," Summers says. "Then it hit me: I could be one of them."

At age 27, she began investing, scaling back her lifestyle and eliminating debt. The experience was so empowering, she says, she began to wonder why no one had ever told her how important good money habits are.

To ensure her peers get that wake-up call early, Summers founded the Sutra Foundation in San Francisco in April 2000. The organization seeks to motivate and educate young women about getting started on saving and investing for retirement.

The Sutra Foundation co-sponsored the OppenheimerFunds study on Gen-X women, as did Third Millennium, an advocacy group for young Americans. But Summers' efforts at empowering her contemporaries didn't stop there. Her first book, "Get In The Game: The Girl's Survival Guide to Money & Investing," is due from Bloomberg Publishing this summer.