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Personal finance sagas abound, especially in my family. As a child, I could hear Grandpa, the doctor too busy to deal with anything as mundane as calling his stockbroker, telling Grandma: “Anna, get Natalie Meyers on the phone!”
A discussion about whether to sell their shares in El Paso Natural Gas would then ensue between Grandma and Natalie. Whatever the outcome, I could hear Grandpa in the background saying: “Anna, I told you to get rid of El Paso months ago. Now we’re taking a bath on it.”
Regardless of the performance of that particular investment, Grandma and Grandpa did well enough to pay for college for my siblings and me, medical school for my brother, and elegant weddings for my sister and me.
“Bonds are for schmucks” is the comment I often heard coming from the mouth of my father. Taken in context, I now realize that he could invest solely in stocks because he worked in government at a time when fixed benefit pensions were the norm. Now in their ‘90’s, my parents seem to have done well enough to enjoy living in a nicely landscaped, assisted living facility in the South.
Responsibility for my own personal finances began when I was widowed at 39. Smart enough to reject the advice of a sleaze ball trying to push an annuity on me, I ultimately connected with a money manager who gave me sound advice as a favor to a friend.
But before I began working with Fred, an avuncular adviser who told me he knew all about funding college for my daughter Daphne because he had three grown daughters, I put whatever money was in a taxable account into the Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund. That was on the advice of my father, and Fred thought it was a good investment.
My first purchase occurred in 1990, when the fund was selling at a price of $32.06 a share. With Fred’s help, the S&P 500 shares soon became part of a balanced portfolio, replete with individual stocks and a ladder of Treasury Notes – at a time when interest rates were worth chasing.
Still I bought a few more S&P 500 shares here and there. After doing a lucrative consulting assignment over the course of a few weekends, I thought about buying myself a fur coat, something nobody in their right mind would wear just a few years later. But I decided to invest the money instead, and my chest swelled with pride at my own self-discipline.
By the time my daughter Daphne graduated from Barnard in 1998, I began to develop an emotional attachment to my Vanguard S&P 500 shares, bordering on love. Thanks to growth in the fund’s value, my balance sheet suffered not nearly as big a hit as I’d expected. I’d mostly used the T-notes to pay for four years of college.
You didn’t have to be an avid reader of Jonathan Clements’ personal finance column in The Wall Street Journal throughout the 1990’s, to remember him saying that one should never base buying or selling decisions on emotion. So when I decided to renovate the kitchen in my old house at the beginning of the 21st century, I funded it by selling off some S&P 500 shares. Because the market was doing okay at the time, the value of the account seemed to bounce back, making the withdrawal have a relatively minor impact on my net worth.
When Daphne announced her engagement in 2007, I sold some S&P 500 shares and wrote my daughter a check to pay for her wedding. By the time my first grandchild arrived, I became concerned about the fact that Daphne and her husband had purchased a beautiful home in a school district that raised concerns for me. Without any strings attached, I transferred a modest chunk of S&P 500 shares to my daughter and her husband, suggesting that this be used to bolster a down payment on their next home, hopefully one in a neighborhood with good public schools.
After retiring nearly two years ago, I decided to engage the hands-on money manager my sister and her husband began using nearly 20 years ago. The appeal of bundling our accounts for a family discount, coupled with the fact that our adviser Josh is a great resource for all sorts of financial finance questions, made my decision a no-brainer.
When I met with Josh, a man whose athletic appearance suggests he’s younger than his chronological age, he and I agreed that because my remaining S&P 500 shares lived in a taxable account, we would leave them alone. As for any S&P 500 shares in retirement accounts, we would sell them off to diversify.
Earlier this month, I phoned Josh, asking if I should sell off the last of my shares in the Vanguard S&P 500 fund. A couple of weeks ago, I sold it at $190.17 a share. Based on a conversation he had with my accountant about big picture tax considerations unique to me, they both thought it made sense for me to use the proceeds as a source of retirement income.
Selling those shares off was a bittersweet experience, because if I don’t have any more, I can no longer benefit from bounce-back. But as the New Year and the anniversary of my first husband’s death approaches, do I risk sounding self-congratulatory for thinking he’d be proud of me for having the brains to get sound investment advice and being able to give our daughter the things that mattered when they mattered? How blessed I was to have the shares to sell!
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