His name is ironic, Bernie Madoff... because he, made off, with everyone's money.

We can all agree though that it's a good thing Bernie gets to be under "house arrest" in his lavish Manhattan apartment that was paid for with the billions of dollars he stole.

Jail is more for people who got caught selling a small amount of weed.

Di-ver-si-fi-ca-tion

@edebaby: Suppose you did, but the companies you invested in had their investments with Madeoff?

What a drama queen. Geez Louise. She was so upset "she googled the Hemlock society".

Quit complaining. I know that I am not alone, tired of hearing your whining.

What a tradgedy, she took her first subway ride in over 30 years!

What a clueless spoiled individual.

Go buy some cheese to go with your whine.

Just shut up! You were an idiot to put all your money in one basket. Quit blaming everyone else for your mistakes and start taking responsibility for your own actions.

I am angry at all these fiscally irresponsible people crying now and asking for my tax dollars to bail them out.

Where is the aid for those of us that have played by the rules, been honest and still struggle?

It's just incredibly hard feeling sympathetic for a woman who whines about having to sell her second home and let her maid go. This woman openly admits she has such a nice collection of jewelry she can sell it and live off of the proceeds.

There are so many other people working full time and still not being able to put away a penny, and yet we're supposed to feel sorry for someone who has been living high on the hog for most of her life? She's horrified she'll have to iron her own shirts, and do her own dishes! Yeah, what does she think the rest of us have been doing? She has the gall to brag about not taking the subway in 30 years, then expects us to feel sorry for her because no she'll have to use PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION!!!

A subway ride - the horror, the horror.

@FishAroundMyAnkles_GitEmSteveDave: doesn't sound like you really diversified then.

@se7a7n7: The Judge in this case needs his head examined. He set a date for Madoff to get bail and have people vouch for him. He couldn't get enough of either, so the Judge lowered his limits. Now, they caught Madoff mailing stuff out, and they're STILL letting him stay there.

Send him to a county jail, and let him sleep a few nights there.

I found much of my reaction mirrored in the comments on the site. It's a terrible thing that she's been stolen from, but she seems mostly horrified that her life will be reduced to the level of the rest of us. Being stolen from is tragic. Living like me isn't.

>I just wanted financial stability.
>And I had lost money with other financial advisers
I wanted financial stability, so I did what any fiscally responsible entity would do: invest all my money in one place.

How many people out there don't even have enough money to warrant a financial adviser?

Cry some more, lady, cry some more.

Madoff is a turkey

Why are the complaints so harsh? She's already back to writing trying to earn back her life. I can understand how she feels.

@edebaby: agreed

@buzzybee: When you reach your retirement, do you expect to have to get back into the workplace?

Oh, I see that the lack of sympathy will continue on this site.

If you read the posts, you see that she built up this life for herself through hard work over the years. Yes, there were lucky breaks too, but she's hardly the only person in the world to have had a good education or to have made smart/lucky career choices. It almost sounds like some readers think because she was richer than they, then she doesn't deserve the life she has. Or had.

And the root of her complaints is this: that she will lose the financial independence that she worked all these years to prepare for in retirement. Now she's re-entering the work force to shore up funds again, but she has very real worries that the industries she's got experience in are precisely the ones that are in the dumps, and at her age she's going to face some real difficulties/obstacles in starting fresh careers.

I think her comments about white shirts and a maid and doing her own nails are meant to be a bit shocking and silly, to indicate what she was used to and why this is going to be so hard for her. But I don't think that means you should treat her like *she's* the criminal in this situation. Her only crime that I can see, unless you're against bigger things like our capitalist system, is that she put all her retirement eggs in one basket. She's hardly the only one to have fallen for Madoff's scam.

But I think anyone dismissing her as an elitist or saying she doesn't know from hard work is being a bit petty. It's as if you're savoring her sudden and life-changing misfortune because she had it better than you before the fall.

It's sad to see all the posts above mine where people can't understand that suffering is relative. The person was bamboozled and scammed. I'm sorry that you take time to show your jealousy on internet posts about strangers you've never met. This has always been a problem here. Anybody remember when one of the editors went to an opera and got a phone call from the philharmonica's fundraisers- and then the commenters said that it wasn't a real problem because OMG U R RICH? Pathetic.

@concordia: "I am sometimes so paralyzed physically by the thought that I literally cannot move."

She literally can't move here, people. Her situation has rendered her completely immobile!

@Socially_Inept_But_Not_Baby_Crazy: Agreed. I wouldn't wish for anyone to lose their savings, but she is still better off than most of America.

@floraposte:

Exactly. Losing years of planned financial security due to someone else's thievery, that much is lamentable, and I sympathize with her feelings of hopelessness. No matter what happens to Madoff, she will never get her millions back. The money is just gone.

But her attitude about the average-person lifestyle is just ridiculous. I think the rest of us would be grateful to have a house to sell and a stash of expensive jewelry to live on if our financial bottom fell out from under us. There is no gratefulness in the way she writes. There is only fear that she will never have her privileged life back, and she will be stuck taking public transportation for the rest of her life.

@bxbrett: So it's okay to lose all of your money if you used to have a lot of it?

Even if she had most of her money in one fund, how is this her responsibility instead of Madoff's? It's not like the fund tanked, it's more like there never was a fund -- it was a scam.

@Chris Walters: I think that what makes some people lose sympathy is the way she seems to looks down at the people who live at the level to which she ahs fallen. In the second post, she's clearly (and rightfully) annoyed at the snap judgements people have made about her based on seeing just a slice of her life. But in the next post, she has no problem making the same kinds of judgements about the parents in Popeye's, for example. I think that kind of attitude is what is throwing a lot of people off. It certainly lessened my sympathy.

@edebaby:

Bla-ming-the-vic-tim. Not cool. Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20.

Whoa! Slow down folks! No, this woman will not be on the street, but she DID indeed lose her life savings through the deception of another. Yes, she has enough left that she won't be begging on the street, but she will indeed have to make some major lifestyle adjustments. She DID plan for the future, thought her investments were diversified, and got burned.

A major lifestyle change like this is certainly cause to complain. Just because it could, in fact, be worse, doesn't make it just a trivial adjustment.

@Chris Walters: Thank you for making the first intelligent, thoughtful post of this thread.

I can see this from her point of view. She had a reality check and to anyone, that's hard. I wish more people like her had to have her kind of awakining; you can bet that some polices in this country would be changed (UHC anyone?)

@concordia: God, this woman just gets better and better.

"I took half of a very strong tranquilizer that I'd been stashing for years in case of a death in the family."

Yeah, imagine having to deal with difficult events in life like an adult. How terrible.

Where's the compassion and humanity. It's pretty big of yall to kick an old lady when she's down. I hope no one were to treat you in such a way.

@se7a7n7: Yeah, that's something I still really don't get. Why do business criminals go to minimum security prisons, get special bail treatment, etc? I am failing to see any real punishment going on, other than the toll on their egos.

@Chris Walters:

I don't think that's it at all, Chris. It's the way she speaks about commoner life that's just hard to identify with. Losing her financial stability is traumatic, and I feel for her. I could not wish that on anyone. It's just that I think most of us on this site would be grateful to have a spare house to sell and a stash of expensive jewelry if our bottom fell out from under us. I sense no gratefulness for even those small blessings in what she writes, just self-pity that she has to live like a person without means. That's what makes her story so hard to take.

@Shadowman615: I second that!

@Chris Walters: I think what makes me lose sympahty is that her money was easy money. Writing sex books isn't hard, getting them published is, but not as hard as the labor instensive jobs my friends and famliy work.

@Shadowman615:

I dunno, if someone told me to sell my house and put all of my investments into one IPO that will revolutionize the way we use the bathroom, because it is guaranteed to make me a millionaire...I'd have to be pretty stupid.

@WBrink: PS - Don't forget that those tickets were under $20!

@Chris Walters: Chris, I don't think you can even claim that she wasn't adequately diversified in her portfolio. She had real estate holdings, jewelry, separate bank accounts, and so forth. Most allocate their investments based on the amount of perceived risk placing the bulk of their needed retirement savings in low risk investments. Penney wasn't stupid in this decision. She went with Maddoff's stable interest paying fund in leiu of potentially more lucrative, but higher risk investments. Yes, she placed most of her retirement savings into Maddoff's fund, but in the absence of criminal activity, such a decision is usually made on the assumption that this investment would be relatively low risk.

Consider it this way. If your lowest risk savings were wiped out and you had only higher risk investments to survive on, you would probably be in a pretty bad place. This is not expected and only happened because of a mastermind's criminal activities. Penney wasn't stupid and did everything that a normal individual should.

You are correct that the article is written mostly in jest and a little bit of gallows humor. I'm glad as an colleague of Penny's you noticed this.

But its sad to see those currently working and saving for retirement lack the forward thinking compassion to identify that something like this could happen to anyone. There is little worse than being forced to return to your career (in this case her writing) after working hard all your life to earn the retirement you deserve.

@floraposte: @concordia:
Perhaps she could find work as a mannequin.

@cordeliapotter: Posted before finishing: ...and they live hand to mouth with no money to save. I even feel guilty about my own earnings because I make more money and do inifintely less work than they do.

oh, wah. this woman is clearly smart, and [did, at least] work hard for her cash. but, honestly? you own 3 homes and you're going to call yourself a BAG LADY?

also, she's getting bank to write this, what with the popularity it's garnering. let's not dive off the deep end here, woman.

@se7a7n7: Who ever said that the justice system in the USA was fair? Plutocracy grants boons to its own.

@WBrink:

Well, it's tragic, but I am supposed to feel bad for someone that dumped their ENTIRE savings into one investment?

If this was a black guy that works at a car wash and he bought out a gas station's entire lotto ticket stash with his life's savings, because his little brother happens to be good at math and told him statistics say he will win 1.2 million, and ended up winning $153, we'd make fun of him just the same.

@bxbrett: "I am angry at all these fiscally irresponsible people crying now and asking for my tax dollars to bail them out."

Who's irresponsible? This lady made what anyone would have called a smart choice at the time: she invested her money with a man that everyone around him believed as a proven track record.

She was robbed, pure and simple. I feel bad for her. I didn't have her money but that doesn't mean she did anything to cause this to happen to her.

@concordia:

"Dude, it was so funny I literally shit my pants!"

"Well, what did you do?"

"What do you mean, dude? I was laughing…"

"I mean, what did you do with your shitty pants?"

"No, dude, I didn't REALLY shit my pants, I LITERALLY shit my pants!"

-- David Cross

@FishAroundMyAnkles_GitEmSteveDave:
The judges are on the take!
There's no other possible explanation.

@cordeliapotter: So why aren't your friends and family all just writing books if it's really an easier way to make a living?

A job doesn't have to be physically taxing in order to be considered hard work. There's a lot more to being a successful writer than simply typing a few hours a day and contacting prospective publishers. And this is someone who also spent a good part of her life working as a cashier.

@Chongo: Haha. Davis Cross owns.

@Saboth: Oh, is THAT what Madoff was pitching?

@cordeliapotter:

What is your idea of hard work? Your value is proportional to the value you can bring to an employer. Anyone can do simple, menial, labor-intensive work, but not everyone can write and publish books.

If it isn't that hard, tell your friends and family to start writing. But don't cut a woman down because she polished her skills and succeeded.

Sympathy for others is fine, but that doesn't change the fact that they are less valuable.

@sirwired: I agree. I sympathize with her position, and I think a terrible thing happened to her that wasn't remotely her fault. She has put in a lot of hard work over the years, and she deserved better.

But I also don't find her likeable, and I think she's not doing a good job of differentiating between the trauma of a life gone topsy turvey and the trauma of living without luxuries. And I don't think saying that is blaming the victim or suggesting that I'd face a change in circumstances with a breezy smile.

@Chris Walters: Thanks, Chris, for a great summation. And @Anathema777: I think you make an excellent point.

@calquist: So were most of Madoff's clients.

What happened to them is still newsworthy and still sucked.

@katieoh: Exactly, nothing smarter than making the most of the situation to start recovering her losses.

People read this as if it's a testimonial and cry for help. This is literary entertainment often referred to as "gallows humor." I actually find it amusing.

And isn't published work supposed to be for our entertainment?