A little windfall

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States. Ordinarily I’d list some of the bigger things in the world for which I’m grateful—like having four years of a stable, sane and secure administration, run by a decent and empathetic president and vice president, and all the benefits that has brought the world. And I am grateful for that; profoundly.

But this year, I’m going to single out something that seems passing strange to me.

As I may have expressed once or twice, I am not looking forward to the next four years, when we will not have sane, decent or even competent people running the US government. It will be a mixture of both kleptocracy and kakistocracy; that does not bode well for anyone in the world (except for the kleptocrats and kakistocrats). The week after the election I was wigging out because I am now dependent upon retirement savings for my income. Who knows what Republicans are going to do with Social Security, and what happens to every 401(k) in the country when Cadet Bonespurs enacts policies that tank the global economy?

So a couple of weeks ago I reached out to my financial adviser to find out where I stand. (There was a bit of a kerfuffle about that, but I don’t need to go into detail. It was resolved to my satisfaction and someone is apparently getting a talking to.) We had a call, then he did some research and we met again last Thursday.

He showed me the numbers and charts, and brought out his sock puppets to explain to me. Basically, I’m in good shape. Even for the upcoming chaos, I’m actually in great shape.

One thing he recommended was that I close out my money market account and dump the cash into my portfolio account because interest rates have gone down, and I can get a better return than the money market rate.

Me: Let me get this straight: a year ago, you recommended that I open this account, and now you want me to close it?

FA: Yes—because the interest rates are down.

Me: Oh. Okay.

Well, when my adviser recommends something, it means I’m going to get a call from someone else on the team to walk me through the execution of that action. Tout de suite. I’d forgot about that when a couple of hours later, I got a call on my mobile from a number I didn’t recognize. I swiped the reject button and put the phone back in my pocket. Only apparently I’d actually swiped the accept button, and now my pocket was talking to me. That was weird.

However, we got that sorted, and then the team member reminded me that I needed to upload my latest eTrade statement to the portal, because we’re going to move the stock from that account into my managed portfolio. Well, naturally, I couldn’t log into my eTrade site, so I hauled out the physical file folder marked “Investments”, which is where I’ve put every quarterly statement of every single one of the approximately 247 401(k) plans I’ve had in my career, to try to find something with a toll-free phone and an account number on it.

To give you an idea—the folder (and its contents) is about two inches thick.

Well, I found an eTrade statement, so I called the number, got to MorganStanley (which owns eTrade, since about 2022) and then eventually to Juaquín at eTrade. He got me in (I had to change my access email from my work address three domains ago), then spent about five minutes trying to get me to “take advantage of” a consultation with one of the many MorganStanley financial advisers standing by ready to manage my investments.

(I talked with one about two years ago, and quite the hard-sell conversation it was, too.)

Finally I got the statement and uploaded it to TIAA portal.

But—in the process of trawling through the two inches of papers in that “Investments” file, I came across a statement for 160 shares of GIANT SOFTWARE CORP, which I was granted after managing to last there two years after hiring. Just.

Well, the statement was from 2010, from Smith Barney (which was acquired by MorganStanley in 2012). I’ve moved five times since that was mailed to me. I wasn’t sure that the stock would be around—I was talking with a friend on Sunday and he told me it probably went to Washington State's unclaimed property.

(As an aside: that prompted me to look at the Washington escheatment site. I discovered that Comcast owes me $52 for a refund I was due when I moved 14 years ago. It’s on my to-do list.)

Well, that kind of deflated my sails. But on Monday afternoon (after going through the whole Social Security palaver), I called the number on the Smith Barney statement and got through to a very nice woman who walked me through everything I needed to do to get into my atwork.morganstanley.com account, update my profile details (they actually had my current address, because of my eTrade activity, but it’s in a separate system, and the two don’t talk with one another). I almost didn’t call, because I was really knackered after that Social Security exercise.

But I got into the system, downloaded the most recent quarterly statement and then uploaded it to TIAA, emailing the three people working on my action items about it.

Tuesday I got a call from my financial adviser, thanking me for uploading the MorganStanley statement—with a kind of implicit invitation to tell him more about how this came about.

Me: So, I was looking through my two-inch thick “Investments” file, and found the Smith Barney statement on Friday. And I looked up the current GIANT SOFTWARE CORP stock price and thought, “That much? Oh, my!” And then, yesterday, the nice woman at MorganStanley told me how many shares I now have (because dividends), and what the total value now is, and I thought, “Such much?”

He laughed and commented that it’s not very often that one of his clients finds a gigantic chunk of change unexpectedly. (Well—that’s part of my charm.)

Me: I can afford to have cheese on my hamburger!

FA: You can go all the way—get avocado. The organic stuff.

He has to do some research to determine how to cash out to roll over (can’t move the stock, since it’s in an employee stock ownership account) without incurring a tax liability, and then the team member will work with me to sort out the execution.

But today my gratitude is that—despite a number of decisions made over a lifetime of basically fiscal illiteracy—I am reasonably secure to weather the next four years. And that I’m working with someone who’s patient and willing to get down to words of one syllable when talking with me. And that my years at GIANT SOFTWARE CORP yielded an unexpected, ah, dividend, just at a time when my spirits needed lifting.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu