It's been quite a year for me and my family. Here's an excerpt from an article, When Nest Eggs Crack, by Michael Winerip, which was published February 6, 2009 in the Generation B column of the NY Times.
…Her
father had been a highly successful Madison Avenue ad executive. He had
lived well — he loved opera, museums, the racetrack — but had also
saved and invested his money and was generous with his two daughters,
Ms. Jacobson and her twin sister, Louise Crawford, as well as their
families.
Still, like many of his generation, her father had a
prudent streak, preferred the subway to car services. When he grew thin
from colon cancer, Ms. Jacobson tried to persuade him to hire a
food-delivery service. When he wouldn’t, she and her sister would stop
by his apartment with the minestrone or tongue sandwiches he loved.
She
tried getting him to take a car service to his chemo sessions, but he
was stubborn. And then, in mid-August, he called her saying he’d
collapsed on the subway and two big men had to carry him up to the
street.
Not long after, on Sept. 7, 2008, he died.
Watching
his slow, painful end was hard. And while Ms. Jacobson was aware he had
left a substantial estate, she didn’t talk to her stepmother about the
details for weeks. “We were so devastated,” she said. “I was in shock.”
In
October, she received a copy of the will in the mail, indicating that
the estate would be divided, with half going to her stepmother and the
other half to be split between Ms. Jacobson and her twin. “I asked my
stepmother how much,” Ms. Jacobson recalled. “She said: ‘I don’t know.
It changes month to month.’ ”
By November, Ms. Jacobson said she
knew there was an investment portfolio worth about $2 million, and
despite the stock market crash, it hadn’t lost value. The name of the
investment firm, which had offices in New York and London, didn’t mean
anything to her, but she was impressed. “Obviously, this guy had to be
a genius, if we hadn’t lost any money in the last six months,” she said.
SHE did worry that the money was invested all in one place.
On
Dec. 8, Ms. Jacobson, her sister and stepmother had lunch at Teresa’s,
a Ukrainian restaurant in Brooklyn Heights, and for the first time, she
said, she eyeballed the records. “I had no idea what they meant,” she
said. “My stepmother would say: ‘He has it all in T-bills. He’s buying
new stuff.’ It looked like stock in Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Google, Microsoft, IBM.
“It
wasn’t like a laser printout you’d get from Smith Barney,” Ms. Jacobson
said. “It looked typed from an old-fashion computer.”
“I figured, ‘This is how the wealthy do it.’ ”
“My
stepmother said, ‘Let’s wait for the year-end statement before we do
anything.’ I felt like, O.K., this is all good, a light at the end of a
long tunnel. This is going to be my new life. It could be
transformative.”
She and her husband live in an attractive, but
modest co-op in Park Slope, two bedrooms, one bath, which they bought
for $360,000 in 2000.
Now she let herself think of what they could do with $500,000: pay off the home equity loan they’d used to finance the failed in-vitro treatments and the cost of
adopting Sonya from Russia. Put away money for Sonya’s college. Maybe
buy a bigger two-bedroom in the building with a second bathroom. “I
even had fantasy thoughts — buy a little country house,” she said.
“It allowed me to dream,” she said. “It was a nice feeling of this huge pillow protecting us.”
That
week, Ms. Jacobson was putting together a contemporary kitchen for a
Dial Soft Scrub commercial. “We had five days to pound it out,” she
said.
On Thursday evening, Dec. 11, after putting Sonya to bed,
she made a cup of tea, sat on the living room couch with her Mac in her
lap, turned on “Antiques Roadshow,” and went searching online for the
day’s news. She saw a headline about a major investment fraud.
“I thought it was that crazy hedge fund guy,” she said, meaning Marc S. Dreier, the Manhattan lawyer accused of stealing $380 million from investors.
But when she clicked, she saw:
Bernard Madoff
The very name on those old-style investment reports for rich people.
“I was in shock,” she said. “Oh this is insane, this was our worst
nightmare. We had worried about losing money in the stock market, but
…”
