Bear Flag Blog

It's tax day, which is the starting point for this anecdote.

I have an account with a particular stock broker dating back a decade. When I was young and naive and working at Cisco, I got cold-called by a broker and decided to send him some money.

To be fair, he's proven to be very accommodating and I've been a terrible, terrible client. He'd call with suggestions, I would reply in the affirmative and then do nothing, he'd call back a few weeks later when the stock had already risen and discover I hadn't actually acted on his advice. I've changed addresses many times and not informed them. I always called up with questions on tax day itself. Etc. etc.

The last few years I have barely thought about this account, which holds about $40,000 in various stocks. Every year at tax time I'd log onto the broker's website, use my super-secure double-plus-long password, find out that I'd been paid $100 in dividends, and put that on my tax forms. Wouldn't look at the account for the rest of the year.

Well, this year on April 14th I log on as usual, and there's no portfolio. Nothing. I mean, I knew the market had collapsed, but...

I call the broker (who I haven't spoken to in 3 years) and ask what's up. He tells me that in May of 2008, I had closed the account and transferred out the entire $48,000.

Which, of course, I hadn't.

So my blood went cold. Fortunately, he calls back twenty minutes later to correct his statement. Turns out that they had sent me a statement in May 2008 which then came back from the post office as "could not be delivered" - I mentioned I had a habit of moving without telling them - and they automatically closed the account and transferred the money to an "abandoned" holding account.

Now that they have re-established contact with me, they are putting all the cash back into my reactivated account.

(Or so they tell me, I'll report back in 48 hours with the facts of the matter.)

So, on account of some tens of dollars of dividend income and my own bad habits, I have to file for a tax extension.

Lessons:
1) Check on your assets regularly.
2) Don't keep all your money in one place. I realized that, had that account held the proceeds from selling our house, my panic would have probably given me a coronary rather than merely shaky hands. But we have money in several different places, with different brokers - so in the case of actual fraud, we'd at least not be wiped out.