Now that he’s a shareholder in a yacht club, how is this going to affect his liquidity?
My wife and I are not money-conscious in the sense of investing our money wisely and letting it work for us.
We work for it .
It isn’t that we don’t enjoy having money; we enjoy having it and spending it, on ourselves and others; but we probably wouldn’t be very good at being rich.
As Fitzgerald said, the rich are different.
I am absolutely immune to those ads in the paper and on TV urging me to consult one firm of brokers or another, to invest with this or that bank or agency.
I will say that that E. F. Hutton commercial in which the teacher asks the little girl to recite the alphabet is charming. You know . . . the little girl gets up to “ e , f . . . “ and then hesitates. Her eyes light up and she says “E. F. Hutton!” And of course all the other kids in the class bend close, because “when E. F. Hutton talks, everybody listens.”
I have a few shares of Times Mirror stock that were given to me, but I keep them at home in an ordinary drawer file under “Times Mirror.” We have a safe deposit box at the bank, but it has been empty for years. We go on paying for it, I suppose, because one ought to have one.
But now all this is changed. We are investors.
We happen to belong to the Santa Monica Yacht Club, since we own the 32-foot sailboat Calafia. Those two connections are enough to make us seem rich, I know; but actually they are just long-deferred rewards for a lifetime--two lifetimes--of industry and thrift. Neither of them has been paid for with anything but the sweat of our brows.
But recently the yacht club decided to buy the marina on which it stands, at Marina del Rey, and offered its members shares of stock, at $2,000 a share, to get in on the deal.
The money was raised and the marina was purchased. We bought one share each, investing $4,000.
It was a rather complicated deal. We bought the stock as an IRA investment, so we don’t have to pay taxes on the money, for the time being, and the transaction was handled by E. F. Hutton.
That was a few months ago. I forgot about it.
Then the other day we received a letter from E. F. Hutton that evidently was meant to explain everything to us and reassure us that all was well.
The letter was signed by Dave Phelps, who is not only an account executive for Hutton but also a member of the yacht club. He enclosed a statement Hutton had sent his wife on her shares, and explained it to us, observing that “so many people have questions on our statement that I will point out the pertinent features.”
The explanation was as follows:
“1. 1.00 CR. This is cash received.
“2. Cash swept into Hutton Government Fund.
“3. Amount of Money received since the last statement (this period) and year to date. This is not taxed or reported to the IRS.
“4. This section shows all positions in the account. In this case there’s $36 HGF and the 2 shares of SMYC Marina will appear in this section.
“5. If there’s an amount in this area it’s a debit and is owed to E. F. Hutton. If so, the amount is probably $25 and represents the custodian fee. This debit can be eliminated by a tax-deductible check payable to E. F. Hutton or by liquidation of the Hutton Government Fund, if available.”
Now I’m not complaining that that’s gobbledygook--certainly not in the best tradition of the U.S. government or the education establishment. Sentence by sentence it’s clear enough.
It’s just that I don’t really feel that I understand it. It makes me uneasy. I don’t like the idea that my cash is being “swept away” into some fund. Also, it seems to say that if I don’t send in the custodian fee of $25, they’re going to liquidate that fund. I feel anything but reassured.
I’m not saying that E. F. Hutton is not reliable, and not to be listened to when it talks. I just mean that I am not cut out to reap the benefits of the American system of private enterprise.
Recently The Times offered to send my paycheck directly to my bank, so that I don’t have to handle it. I think that’s great. I like the feeling that money keeps appearing automatically in my bank account, without my having to do anything about it, and I can write checks against it when I want to.
I am not a lot more sophisticated, when it comes to money, than Charles Laughton was in that early 1940s movie, “The Tuttles of Tahiti.” He plays a ne’er-do-well beachcomber who somehow comes into a little money. As long as it lasts, he and his family live like kings. Then one day the money runs out and the banker tells him he is overdrawn by $300 or something like that, and Laughton says, “No problem. I’ll just write a check for it.”
I once heard J. Paul Getty complain on a television show that he had so much money it would be impossible to liquidate it all. He just had to go on living with it.
And I’ll bet he had to read a lot of stuff like that letter I got from E. F. Hutton, just to find out where all his money was, and what was happening to it.
Poor guy.
