First Time Tied Up Stories

Protecting your parents: Keep the sharks at bay

(Money Magazine) -- In 45 years as a service scheduler for a Northern California auto dealer, Art Tener learned how to stay organized. Even after retirement, Tener scrupulously kept up his calendar, noting appointments, daily chores, accomplishments.

That's how his son, Jim, learned that his dad had a new friend escorting him to meals and the museum.

"Who is this guy?" Jim asked. That question led Jim to the discovery that the "friend," a local insurance agent, had persuaded Art to roll $113,000 in savings he had in annuities into new deferred annuities that handcuffed the money for up to 16 years -- despite a terminal illness that doctors said meant Art had less than two years to live.

Art, then 79, had been worried about how he would pay for nursing-home care in case his wife, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, one day needed it. He believed the new annuities would help. But the transfers cost him nearly $11,000 in penalties; worse, since he couldn't get to his money without paying large surrender fees, he was no longer able to cover his living expenses without his children's help.

"He lost huge on this thing," says Jim, 52. "Instead of enjoying what turned out to be the last nine months of his life, he didn't have $100 to spare."

One out of every five older Americans has been sold an inappropriate investment, paid excessive fees for a financial product or service, or been a victim of fraud, according to a 2010 study by the Investor Protection Trust; new research from MetLife puts their collective losses at $2.9 billion last year.

Complaints about exploitation of the elderly are clogging the regulatory enforcement system: Some 44% of investor complaints nationwide came from seniors, and about one-third of enforcement actions involved elder investment fraud, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) reports; states with large older populations posted even bigger numbers.

Although that survey was done five years ago, interviews with more than three dozen regulators and consumer advocates suggest that the problem is just as prevalent today.

Says NASAA president David Massey: "Seniors remain our most vulnerable investors."

It's easy to understand why sellers of financial products, legitimate and otherwise, want to target your mom and dad: They're where the money is. After a lifetime of saving, with homes often paid off, the average household led by those 75 and over has a net worth of $638,000.

Where do you get the ideas for your stories?? - Authors by Moonlight

Do you get asked that question as often as I do? Most of the time I try to dodge the query because I hate to admit that I really don’t know where the ideas come from. But when the question comes from my only granddaughter Bunny Rabbit, and she’s really interested—really, really wants to know—I try to give her a reasonable answer.  So after much thinking, a couple of glasses of Riesling, and some internal dialog I wouldn’t want quoted, this is what I tell her.  My stories come from the question “What if…”  As in “What if Cinderella’s step sisters were sweet and loving, and little Cindy was the demanding, selfish, nasty-tempered one?” Or “What if Prince Rudolph, younger brother of Prince Charming, was arranging a convenient accident for his older brother and bride Cindy so Rudolph could usurp the throne from his kingly but incompetent papa?” See what evil things can happen when a romance writer and her feverish imagination take a hatchet to a perfectly good fairy tale! That’s where the ideas come from, just asking ‘what if’. Bunny Rabbit seems satisfied with the answer.

Okay, I explained that source of inspiration—or desperation—to my delightful descendant and think I’m home free, but her next question (the child is sixteen and not easily sent off to play) tells me otherwise.  “So how do you make up all those gooey, sweet love scenes where the guy looks into the girl’s eyes and the moon shines on her hair, and everything is love and roses? How do you know how to write that stuff?” Now that takes more than a glass of wine and some sidestepping. After all I’m her grandmother. I can’t tell her that those scenes are based on personal experience. Her mother would be appalled—or more embarrassing, howl hysterically. And wonderful Miss Rabbit would be amazed that someone in her dotage (that would be me) could even remember such events, much less admit experiencing them. So, what else? I lie. (I do lie for a living you know, making up stories and all, so I think I can get away with it.) I tell her that certain things—the scent of honeysuckle, a phrase from an old song, the taste of a fountain Coke, the sight of a ’57 Chevrolet, the feel of chiffon across my skin—will bring back a memory and I can build scene from that memory. She gets quiet and I think I’m home free—Not!

I realize I’m not getting off that easy because the next words out of her mouth are, “What song? What’s chiffon? A fountain Coke? What’s that? An old car? Why?” And I find that since I’m really good at telling a story, I could probably slither out of this by telling her it’s literary license or trade secrets or something. Somehow my memories demand the truth. So I tell her: The scent of honeysuckle always takes me back to my grandmother’s front porch and reminds me of the boy who walked me back from Sunday school. We’d sit on the porch for hours talking about ‘when we’re grown up …’ and all the things we planned to do. He’d direct movies that I wrote. We’d live in Hollywood and know all the stars.  The smell of honeysuckle fills my mind with the dreams two young people had—age ten or twelve—that didn’t come true, at least not for one of us because that sweet youngster died long ago and his dreams died with him. From that memory I can build one of those love-and-flowers moments because the scent of honeysuckle takes me right back –right back to a brown-eyed boy with plans bigger than he was, with hopes that soared above the flat Texas plains, with a heart too fragile to live in a place full of broken dreams.

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