Take it From Me

Financial planners tell it like it is
You don’t have to look very far to realize that difficulties of earning a living are practically as old as the world itself.
As punishment for eating from the Eitz Hadaas, Adam Harishon was told he would have to work hard just to have bread to eat, and the Gemara equates the difficulty of earning a parnassah with that of Kri’as Yam Suf. Fast-forwarding to contemporary times where each generation becomes accustomed to increasingly higher standards, with yesterday’s luxuries becoming today’s necessities amid increasingly high living costs and to put it simply, there are people who just aren’t making it. We’re not talking about people who have to forgo Pesach in Orlando or $200 bottles of tequila — financial advisors in the frum community are dealing with those who can’t pay their grocery bills and find themselves facing debt so large, it could take them years just to get out of the red. We asked four financial planners to share tips, takeaways, and tales from the trenches.
NAFTALI HOROWITZ
Managing director and portfolio manager with JP Morgan Wealth Management
The Missed Appointment
My day job is in a professional finance setting, but on the side, I use my 18 years of experience to help people who find themselves facing financial difficulties. The case I will never forget started out innocuously — a phone call from someone, I’ll call him Yaakov, who set an appointment for 10 a.m. the next Sunday morning to discuss a challenging financial situation.
When ten o’clock came and went, I assumed that Yaakov must have forgotten the appointment. When he called several hours later to apologize, I suggested that he pop over right then and there.
“Sorry, I can’t,” he said.
“Why not?” I insisted.
“I’m in the hospital now.”
Yaakov had just survived a suicide attempt.
When years of expenses like tuition and braces and summer camp far exceeded his income, Yaakov had taken out a loan from a gemach. He spent the next ten years borrowing from one gemach to pay a loan that had come due at another, eventually racking up a string of loans that totaled well over $250,000.
Before he called me, he had a big gemach loan due — and not a single friend, relative, or gemach to borrow from. Everything came crashing down the night before he was supposed to see me and that was when he made an attempt to end his life.
Situations like this can be the worst I deal with, because there’s a sense of betrayal by close family members and friends who are left holding the bag, plus the humiliation of people knowing that you can’t pay your bills. I tell people all the time: you are better off going collecting tzedakah in shul than building a pyramid scheme of debt that you can never get out of. The shame of taking tzedakah isn’t as bad as the shame of taking people’s money that they give you in good faith, knowing that you can’t realistically pay it back.
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