West Goshen Township, PA – On Dec. 10, Maureen Ebel believed she had $7.3 million in her financial portfolio, and was looking forward to spending the winter at her Florida home.
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A week later, she was forced to begin working as a maid after learning that nearly all of her nest egg had disappeared in the massive Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff.
“If there’s a nickel on the street, I’m picking it up,” the 60-year-old, widowed Ebel told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “This is my fate.”
The fate of the West Goshen Township, Pa., resident now includes having to put her West Palm Beach, Fla., condo and her Lexus SUV up for sale. She plans on taking in a boarder and going back to work full-time.
She’s had to sell off a pingpong table, a painting and some jewelry for a total of just $3,000, and returned a recently purchased $1,300 television to Costco, the Inquirer reported. Other returns -a porch furniture set, a club membership and earrings – took another $11,600 off of her American Express bill.
Ebel is one of many people – perhaps thousands – who lost the vast bulk of their life savings in Madoff’s purported $50 billion fraud, which came to light Dec. 11 when he was arrested by the FBI.
She got the bad news in a telephone call from her Uncle Leonard, 80, who had convinced her to invest $4.5 million with Madoff’s firm after her husband died in 2000. Except for a $50,000 bond – which she cashed in last month – that was all of her money.
“At the time, when [Uncle Leonard] got me into Madoff, he had been a Madoff investor for 25 years, and now he’s a Madoff investor and broke after 30 years,” Ebel said.
“I was married, had a fabulous marriage to a man I loved and worshiped, a physician. We traveled. We had a very fine life. And he’s dead. He died, and every penny I had in the world has been stolen.”
A former nurse, Ebel plans to apply for re-certification so she can got back to work in her former profession.
But she’s taken a job as a maid and caretaker for the elderly mother of a friend, including ironing and vacuuming.
“The first day, I went home and cried,” Ebel told the Inquirer.
Her return to work also ended a new relationship.
“I wasn’t the person I was. I got up and went to work every day,” she told the newspaper. “I was working six days a week, and I’m tired when I get home.”
Ebel, not surprisingly, is furious at Madoff, who has been allowed to remain free on $10 million bail, confined to his $7 million Manhattan penthouse awaiting trial.
“You can’t print it,” she told a reporter who asked what she would do to Madoff if she ever found herself alone with him.
She’s being forced to adjust her fiscal outlook.
During a recent trip to a supermarket, Ebel, for the first time, checked the prices of cartons of cream before finding a two-for-one sale.
Then, she told the Inquirer, she started “rooting through the canned goods” on sale.
“What do I eat? Corn, I’ll eat that,” she said. “String beans, I’ll eat that. Two for one. This is what it is after having an income of $400,000 a year.”
poor lady!! how could a human being do this to another human kind? hope she recovers fast.
what a pitty
nebech, its heartbreaking, lost everything and being left without a penny.
CNN did a sunday 1 hr special on stories very similar two weeks ago .. I’m sure there’ll be a replay.
So sad, people only think big CEO’s were affected, but an honest worker has lost everything to this ganef.
Before people say “why was ALL her money in one place” remember that these investments were thought to be as safe as a bank and earning ten percent interest.
Madoff was so high up the financial ladder he was regarded like a Bill Gates type person. If Bill Gates had an investment opportunity for you at 10% gain a year you would put every penny you own in.
The amazing thing about these ppl are that they all worked for their money and they know what it means to work and they go back to work hard, even if its difficult. That inspires me.
This is obviously very sad. This whole story just confirms the old adage of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Diversification, in contemporary terms.
It is terrible & heartbreaking. One lesson learned one cannot trust one’s own wealth, onliy in Hakodosh Boruch Hu & once you trust in him, little makes adifference you believe all he does is for your good. That is not to say that robbing an almona ,or for that matter anyone, & sending them in to poverty is not a war crime.
If you carefully read this, you see something doesn’t “shtim” She had a $50,000 bond, not $0. She has two homes. Not $0. She can sell off one and live off of that money. So her taking a job is a publicity stunt. Or else she lived with crazy credit card bills — she spent without cheshbon and owes because of that. This is no pauper by any means who has to eat canned corn. I am sure there is more jewelry and paintings to be sold off. Look at her home in teh background. That is not to say she wasn’t robbed, but she isn’t being honest about her finances.
noone is ever farzichert in anything
we just have to daven to hashem should help us in all ways
This is a beautiful story. Ken Yirbu. She really did exaggerate with that whole “nickel off the street” nonsense though. For that she should be publicly flogged. There really are people who rush to pick up nickels off the street and she’s spitting in their faces with her lies. She’s still got plenty plenty PLENTY. Thank God though that she has plenty less than she had yesterday. This really is a nice story.
And for all of you holier than thou-nicks who view me as a monster, you might want to consider the fact that while I lack pity for someone who lived like a keinig all her life and is now just left with maybe a couple of million dollars (or maybe just ONE million! Nebach!) you – and her – have almost no practical pity for the fifty million walking dead Americans who live in trailers that smell like sewage, slave at two or three embarrassing jobs all day for minimum wage and have teeth pulled in their twenties because they’ve never been to a dentist. Who’s the rachman and who’s the achzar here? EY?!
$11,000 off her Amex card? Geez some people know how to waste money…..
Very tragic.
I hope that the nashim of her area will try to reach out and console and befriend her.
nebach
Concerning diversification, that’s supposed to apply to investments not the person doing the investing. In fact, when you diversify amongst person’s doing the investing you can unknowingly be not diversifying sufficiently as your investors duplicate each other. She hired Madoff to diversify for her, not steal $4.5 million.
People here aren’t considering that her properties might be deeply mortgaged and be worth less then her debts in that area. As for whether she is now living purposefully beneath her means now as a publicity stunt. Who knows? More importantly, who cares?
i know someone who gave him 9mill. and was living off the intrest today he has nothing.
and madoff sits in in his penthouse apartment that piece of s….
G-d giveth and G-d taketh.
Nebech, to see people without a heart. It is her business, not yours to have an eleven thousand dollar balance on her American Express card. It is her business to live like a king, and your business to live like a jlub. Here you have a woman who is a bittera rachmoness, and instead of pity, some here would like to paint her as a Leona Helmsley? Others are trying to figure out if it “shtims”. Shame on you.
come on
she has 2 good houses, and she is going to work as a maid ?
question: does she have children?
the fact is she is only 60 and thought she had plenty to live on, so with all that gone you feel insecure even if you have a home to sell of . she still has a whole life ahead of her and has to support herself, something that she most probably never did. Of course it is heartbreaking.